KTOWN WATERS PUBLISHING

Copyright © 2015 Peter Stier Jr

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Ktown Waters Publishing, Los Angeles, CA.

ISBN-13: 978-0692582329

ISBN-10: 0692582320

Cover Art Design & Illustration: Sara Winkle

(instagram.com/sara.winkle)

Interior Design: Colleen Sheehan (wdrbookdesign.com)

Tail me on Twitter @peterstierjr

Check the blog: mindwashfollies.blogspot.com

“HEY, WHOSE story is this, anyway?”

“Yours.”

“Mine?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. What’s happening here?”

“You are being interrogated.”

“I am?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. What’s at stake?”

“Your mind. And the planet Earth.”

“Oh. I guess we should get on with this, then….”

IF FINISHING this novel were a matter of life and death, then I didn’t seem to be in any rush to save the universe. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t in a rush to do anything. My head was still in a mild fog from the pills I had spent the last month testing down at the A-to-Z Research and Clinical Trials Center in Redondo Beach, CA. Easy cash. $2000 for residing in a clinic and taking experimental pharmaceuticals. One month of room and board, meals covered, just pop the pills, get the blood pressure checked daily, blood drawn a few times per week, and write out a little “how are you feeling?” report daily. Oh, and you can’t leave the premises until the month is up. Piece of cake for a moneyless, bonafide hack writer like myself.

It’ll inspire me to finish the novel. I’ll have plenty of time to do it there.

Yeah. Right.

Most of the stay was a fog. I don’t even recall getting discharged, and that was a while ago.

Not sure what those pills did, but the booze I had already blown most my money upon probably didn’t help matters. I was beginning to go from “drunk hack writer” to just plain drunk,and a blackout one to boot.

Oh well.

A walk to the liquor store was in order, to “collect my thoughts” and wind up for the big afternoon and night of writing. Damn if I wasn’t going to finish this book.

But first, I needed fuel.

Down the stairs I went and exited my building—formerly a hotel for the “who’s who” in Hollywood in the 1920s and 30s which had been “renovated” into a semi-low-rent apartment building that seemed to attract aspiring actors, writers, directors, and producers, which really meant that it housed a bunch of waiters and waitresses, dancers, caterers, bartenders, night watchmen, con-artists, and bell-hops. I was the odd-man out: my aspirations had nothing to do with the movie industry. I was a novelist.

That meant I was more delusional than all of them combined.

Since my childhood dreams of becoming an astronaut had been shot to hell, might as well aim for the gutter. Be the legit, street-credentialed, from-the-gut author that the establishment refused to notice, but because of a cult-like following I would amass, the establishment could not ignore.

Like I said, I was delusional.

Outside, plenty of afternoon traffic kicked up dust and noise. It was an overcast and mild Los Angeles day, and the smell of rain was in the air, along with the cacophony of thirty different car-horns bleating and beeping and honking.

I walked toward the Monsignor Romero Tienda, a little market/liquor store owned by a nice old El Salvadorian couple. The cause of the traffic snarl and mass car-horn din manifested into my awareness: some poor sap wearing desert camouflaged pants and a tank-top was trying to push his VW Vanagon out of traffic and into a gas station/mechanic on the corner and it was pissing off many an asshole whose progress to whatever bullshit place they had to get to was being impeded. Behind the steering wheel of the Vanagon was only visible a little head with braided ponytails, the man’s little sister or daughter. He was trying to direct her into the gas station/mechanic, but without much success.

I trotted out into the honking traffic. “Hey man, I’ll push.”

He looked at me, relieved. “Yeah. The station.”

I nodded as he ran around and got into the vehicle. One of the cooks from the papusaria joint next to the gas station appeared by my side and the two of us pushed the VW into the gas station. The cook and I shook hands and he walked back into his restaurant.

The guy got out along with the girl. He was in his mid-twenties. She could be no older than seven.

“Man, I really appreciate that,” he said.

“No sweat,” I said.

“But you are sweating!” the little girl said, pointing at my sweat-ridden shirt.

“You are right. Yes sweat!” I said.

She laughed at that one.

“Broke down, huh?”

“Think the fuel pump went out.” He looked down.

“We’re trying to get to Arizona so my daddy can work. But we got no—”

“Honey, that’s enough. The nice man doesn’t need to hear this.” He patted his girl on the head then glanced up at me. “Thanks again.”

“The V.A. screwed my daddy. He got nerve gassed by our own guys in Desert Storm and now they won’t admit it so we’re—”

“Honey, what did I say? That is not a story we need to be telling everybody.”

“But it’s true!” said the little girl.

“You were in Iraq?”

“Army.” He pointed to the “Honorably Discharged Veteran” license plate on the back of his VW. He patted his girl on the head again.

The owner of the garage, Hamlet, an intense-eyed Armenian who always gave the impression he wanted to kick your ass but was actually a straight-up guy, walked toward us, looking like he wanted to kick our asses. He didn’t ask any questions. He stubbed his little cigar out on the pavement, reached into the VW, popped the hood then went to the front of the vehicle and checked the engine out.

“Fuel pump. $200 total. I can do now,” he said, then took out another of the little convenience store cigars from the wrapper and lighted it. He walked back into the garage.

The guy who I had just helped shook his head. He didn’t have the money. Well, I bet he’d probably $200 to his name, which was the cost of fuel to get him to a new life in Arizona. He could probably get the vehicle fixed, then be stuck here, the very prison of a city he was attempting to flee.

His little girl was humming some popular tune, walking along a crack and pretending it was a tightrope. She didn’t seem to have a care in the world.

Admirable.

In my wallet, a bunch of twenties resided. Ten of them, to be precise. Last of the pharmaceutical experiment pay.

Shit.

The girl hummed and played.

Her dad tried to figure out the next move.

I took out the stack of bills, walked over to the dad, and handed them to him.

“No way, dude. I can’t,” he said.

“Hey man, if you don’t take it, then I’ll just walk into the garage and hand it to Hamlet.”

He tried to keep it cool but his eyes watered up a bit. He took the money. “Thanks, brother.”

“Good luck.” We shook hands.

The little girl stopped her shenanigans and looked up at me and gave me one of those beaming and beautiful smiles that can only emit from untarnished innocence. “You’re nice,” she said.

Rain started falling. A flash of lightning and a thunderclap reverberated throughout the atmosphere. Never experienced that before, not in Los Angeles. The being called “nice,” that is.

And the lightning.

I walked across the street, back to my building.

I climbed up the stairs and unlocked the door to my apartment. Thanks to the rain today as well as the past week, the place hadn’t been as hot as usual. In fact, it was relatively cool.

I like that.

When it’s hot, all I want to do is relax and try not to contemplate how hot it is —that and drink cold, cheap beer. But when it’s cool, I tend to move around, read, do a little writing, maybe even exercise a touch.

What pisses me off: on the tube some façade-ridden newscaster smile notifies another façade-ridden newscaster smile how “beautiful” it’s going to be tomorrow when the forecast calls for 95 degrees Fahrenheit.

95 degrees is not my idea of “beautiful.”

It melts my brain.

As a matter of fact, I have an accurate portrait of Hell in my mind when I envision 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Especially when no air conditioning exists in the place you are residing in.

What gets me are those fake smiles turning to (real?) frowns when the weather clown predicts “a good chance of rain for the afternoon”… as though he were predicting the apocalypse. And then the senior buffoon turns and says, “Well, we sure could use the rain.” And the rest of the robot rubes sitting by him nod their heads in agreement at his sage proclamation. Nauseating.

It had been raining, like I was saying. I thought about what to do. I opened the refrigerator and took out one of the two remaining cans of beer. Miller Wide-Mouth. Don’t care much for the wide-mouthed option Miller has foisted upon us. They prompt the beer to be guzzled faster than with the regular-topped cans. The wide-mouth may be swell if time is of the essence in swallowing the brew and/or garnering a buzz, but the savoring of each and every gulp is sacrificed. With the wide-mouth, the ends are more critical than the means.

Actually, upon further thought, it is Miller, so the faster it gets over with, the better. They know how crappy their stuff is, so they are doing us a favor.

I drank down the first beer and grabbed the last one. This one was poured into the cleanest glass on-hand that didn’t smell bad. I drank it down, but with greater deliberation and patience, even though it was Miller. I guess I was a glutton for self-induced suffering.

THE BEER was all gone and the rain had stopped.

With plenty of time to burn, I knew that something productive needed to happen. Two-and-a-half garbage bags of aluminum cans sat in the corner of the kitchen, so a visit to the recycling place would be something to do. Then I would get to writing that damn novel.

How had it come to this? What happened to that young, brash go-getter that was going to put the world in a wedgie and knew that he would be somebody, do something, and write that masterpiece of a novel that would mean something and make heads turn?

Life, that’s what.

And procrastination.

The kid that thought he was going to amount to something had concluded he was a fraud living in a cold farce of a world that didn’t really give a shit so neither would he.

Perpetual writer’s block and a steady regimen of booze will do that to a person.

I had no money left at all, so going out and cashing in the cans would at least get me through part of the day. I slung the bags over my shoulder and exited my place. I walked down the stairs and out to the back lot where my ’85 Toyota pick-up truck was parked. I tossed the bags in the back and got in. Because I had managed to lose the keys to the vehicle a little while back, I had to start the thing with a flat-head screwdriver. I had removed the steering wheel cover, causing the ignition plug to dangle off the steering wheel column. This ignition plug is a cylinder-like object that is attached umbilically to the column via a series of wires. When a flathead is pushed into the hole of the plug and turned—and with some pressure on the gas-pedal—the vehicle comes alive.

I put the driver in and turned.

The twelve-year-old machine started.

The truck sounded bad.

In fact, if you’ve ever been within earshot of a chain-smoking middle-aged woman who coughs like an old man, you’ve got an idea of what my truck sounded like. That also happens to be the sound of a clutch plate on the verge of doom.

I rammed it into first gear and drove away.

$6.85 WAS the amount I received for my hollow aluminum. That is $6.85 more than I had prior to cashing them in. $6.85 was paid to me for doing nothing aside from drinking cans of beer and making sure the empty ones had a bag all to themselves.

Too bad $6.85 doesn’t cover very much with respect to monthly expenses.

The liquor store next to the recycling place caught my eye.

I went in and a few minutes later I came out with a pint of vodka and a scratch game lottery ticket. I dropped my very last quarter into Happy Jack’s cup.

Happy Jack—the bum who always opened the door for me whenever I entered and exited this particular store and bowed to me as though I were royalty.

Anyway, I hadn’t tested my luck in a while, due to the fact that this (the scratch game ticket) test always yielded the same results: losing. Today’s test of fate was called “Bonus Black Jack.” The odds of this particular game seemed pretty good: my three hands to the dealer’s one. This brief fake-casino stint went as such:

Hand 1: my first card—an ace. Second card—a five.

Hand 2: first card—queen. Second—six.

Hand 3: first card—a nine. Second—an eight.

Seventeen was my best hand. It was time for the dealer to show.

Dealer’s hand: his first card—an eight. Second—the mighty king.

The house won. I didn’t care because I figured I’d lose. With gambling—especially against a state-run operation—the odds are not in our favor (Bonus Black-Jack included). It’s how the loss is handed out which keeps we, the wretched masses, buying, scratching, and losing. The fact, like death, is that we will lose in a scratch game ticket deal called “existence” over the long haul.

Look, I know some day I will die; ‘tis the means and “the lead up” that keeps my curiosity level in life up, the “how will it happen?”wonderment….

How indeed.

As an aside: the most boring and frivolous means of death is suicide: the deathee-to-be has already a firm preview about when and how the expiration of being will transpire. No element of surprise with the suicide. It’s a forfeit rather than a loss—like purchasing a scratch game ticket and tossing the thing into the trash before checking what’s under the wax.

Hey—however few and far between, there do exist on this planet a few winners….

Like I said, I figured I would lose. I reckoned I’d deal with the loss in a manner I had dealt with every single loss in my life hitherto: by going back to my place and drinking the bottle of vodka.

I threw the losing ticket into the trash and felt a tap on my shoulder. A robust dose of patchouli rammed up my nostrils and my eyes watered up a bit as the beret-clad hippie girl who had doused herself in the stuff smiled, her deep brown eyes twinkling. I assumed the scrub next to her extending his grubby hand was her boyfriend.

“Change?” he asked.

“No, man. My last bit of change went to three places—the cup of Happy Jack, that garbage can and in this sack.” I held up my vodka purchase.

The two of them laughed a playful kind of giggle.

“No, brother. Would you like to change?” he said.

He was offering me something: a pamphlet.

I took it, thanked him and they rambled off but the damn patchouli scent lingered.

The pamphlet had the looks of one of those cheap religious-type tracts, with a picture of some very serene, airbrushed-looking hippie pointing at me. The figure wore mirrored aviator shades and had what looked like the Milky Way galaxy emblazoned in the background, as though he were floating in space. Above him were the words (written in spacey font) “Trust me!” and below “A to Z, ALWAYS. I’ll keep you posted.” I chucked the nonsense into the trash next to my lottery ticket and got in my truck.

IN THE truck, heading back to my place, I turned on the radio. The tape player no longer worked after I had driven my machete into the mouth of the bastard. I dialed the knob to the local public radio station. The National Inane U.S. Radio Report Show was playing. A vaudevillian voice, accompanied by circus-like music cracked through the one decent speaker:

“Ladies and Gentlebuttholes—now for this first week of May 1997 … allow the madness to proceed … Froward Moroni presents his Weekly End Jack-up Statement!”

Moroni’s voice had the cadence and style akin to those old “Movie-Tone” news film narrators:

“Flash: Phos Atomos Paradosi, the Big Cheese of the New (and Improved) Interstellar Syndicate has just cut a deal and now his outfit owns most shares of interest in the Milky-Way galaxy … Flash: Most Enemy Reality Authors and Reality Engineers have been tracked to planet Earth and are currently being rounded up, with one of the last lead Reality Author’s being interrogated in an undisclosed location…. Flash: Random sightings of third-eyes atop the foreheads of certain individuals have been reported by various members of the weird populace, the problem is being looked into by LSD-tripping rubes of the Intelligentsia…. Flash: The Experimental drug ‘Fractalyn’ is currently under testing and when approved, will revolutionize not only the way you think but what you think…. Flash: The Originator of All Realities has gone into hiding. Big Cheese Phos Atomos Paradosi has publicly stated: ‘For a being that created it all, that’s a pretty cowardly move. Maybe it’s time you pass the reigns to someone else, like me’…. Flash: A scientific study has proven that all non-scientists are wrong about everything…. Flash: The Royal Commission on Global Bravery has predicted that within the next 15 years, the entire planet will be fully brave and the date will change to be perpetually 1984…. Flash: The entire universe (and everything therein) has doubled in size overnight, the problem is attempting to be corrected…. Flash: the end of this story is being changed as we speak…. And that’s it for now—I am Froward Moroni and you’ve been listening to my Weekly End Jack-up Statement.”

The circus music faded out and I turned the radio off. Same shit every week.

THE NEXT day I woke up at 9:30 A.M. and it was already hot. I didn’t feel like waking up, but I couldn’t fall back asleep. Memory from the night prior was hazy, at best. The deficit was reinforced by the fact that next to me lightly snored a blonde female, clad only in her underwear.

Damn. Another one of those “day after the blackout” moments.

I rolled out of bed and went to the kitchen to get some water to help remove the coat of fur that had grown on my tongue from the drunken night before. My memory wasn’t even a blur—it was an utter lack of anything resembling memory.

On the table by the kitchen stood a 1.5 liter bottle of Mescal.

That explained a lot.

Only a film of fluid—the equivalent of one decent-sized shot glass full—was left at the bottom. I turned on the water, put my mouth under the nozzle, then splashed cold all over my face. I cupped some in my hands and splashed it over my hair, slicking it back.

An incessant radio buzzing permeated my head, followed by a static-ridden signal frequency. A newscaster-type voice intermittently crackled through the static. My own “thoughts” accompanied, or superimposed themselves with the static-garble. Then another voice, this one calm and assertive, crackled in: “I’ll meet you at the mountain,” it said.

What the hell? I wondered.

I walked to the bathroom, looked in the mirror, splashed some more cold water on my face, took a piss, and walked back out to the bottle of Mescal.

“Eh, screw it.” I grabbed the bottle and polished off what was left.

The shot went down really hard, like the clog in a toilet on the verge of needing a plunger rescue. The burn writhed its way down my pipes. My thoughts scattered like dust mites and I attempted to collect them one spec at a time, trying to string together whatever pieces of memory I could before my unfamiliar houseguest woke up.

I closed my eyes.

“AND WHAT did she say to you after she woke up?” An unseen voice with a hollow cadence interrogates me. He sounds like the calm-voiced computer “HAL” from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The room is absent of any source of light, yet I can see my own body. I can’t decipher whether or not any walls or ceiling exist here, but I do sense an overwhelming vastness of space in this strange venue. I’m in a Lay-Z-Boy recliner. Not restrained, but somehow unable to move. Contentment and utter comfort pour over my being: I could spend an eternity in this recliner….

A complete awareness of my own past, present and future swarms within my head. My tenure as a human being is before me—in my mind—like a slide show that entails every physical and mental instance of my life. Time seems non-existent, or at least irrelevant.

I ponder my interrogator’s question, “…what did she say to you after she woke up?”

“HEY … ARE you okay?”

I opened my eyes to find the girl waving her hand in my face.

Blond hair, blue eyes, no makeup and completely beautiful.

I blinked, scanning the room of my place. She had put on one of my button-up long-sleeved shirts, which almost covered up half her body.

“Are you sick?” she asked.

“Uh … no. I don’t think so.”

The Blonde grinned. “You look out of it. Do you even remember anything from last night?”

Anything relative to last night was a complete blackout. I still couldn’t place the girl, how I had met her, what we—or anyone else—had talked about “last night” and moreover, what the hell was going on inside my noggin.

“I believe I got boozed up. To be honest with you, I can’t remember a damn thing— none the less who you are.”

“Wow, they did do a number on you. It’s all right, that’s why I’m here. And you’re right. You were really drunk last night. Couldn’t even read your stuff. You almost spilled beer all over your work-in-progress.”

Ah yes. My “work-in-progress.” It had been a while since I had contributed a single word to my pile of shit attempt at that “post-modern” novel I had been chipping away at for way too many moons. Wasn’t I supposed to work on that thing last night?

…AND I am completely burned-out. The words “fuck you” seem to have replaced “thank you” and “how are you?” in social pleasantries etiquette. It’s a lot easier to flip someone off or blast the car horn than it is to display simple courtesy and respect these days.

Crude arrogance, low-rent machismo and mean cynicism are chic.

Declarations of war are more exciting than allowing someone to merge into traffic.

Bullets outweigh love letters. They travel at a greater velocity and are much more poignant, also. (What else can I say?)

“Hey barkeep, gimme another then another and at least seventeen more after that … I’m gonna be here for awhile.”

Then she struts in. Legs. Body. Face. Brain. Eyes. Lips. You know the rest.

She performs an all-inclusive scan of the place. Her gaze hones in on me, she approaches, and sits down and tells me my life story.

THE STORY CUTS TO:

A field on the outskirts of town.

A podium sits in the field. Lights are amassed. THE REPORTER scribbles frantically into his notebook. THE RINGLEADER (clad in an outfit of a decorated World War II four-star General) approaches the podium and begins his spiel, which is heard in the background.

“This time he has gone too far….” THE REPORTER scribbles into his notebook.

NEXT, THE STORY CUTS TO:

The interior of a dive bar. It is night.

In a booth at the back of the bar, THE REPORTER is seated, along with THE BRUNETTE and THE BOYFRIEND. They are all loaded.

THE REPORTER rants: “Filing a declaration of war against the New (and Improved) Interstellar Syndicate at this point in time is like attempting to go into battle armed with only a fork and a mule against a Roman legion. I mean, the N(aI)IS is at least as big as history. Shit.”

THE BRUNETTE is intrigued. She leans in closer to THE REPORTER. “I’ve never heard of them … the—what did you call it?”

THE REPORTER is oblivious to the fact that this young woman seems to be flirting with him. He gives them the lowdown: “The New (and Improved) Interstellar Syndicate—or N(aI)IS—is a treasonous, secret group that controls the planet Earth, as well as a small section of the Andromeda Galaxy. These nameless, faceless yet rich and powerful interstellar business barons are attempting to expand their market to entail the entire Milky Way. Planet Earth is to be their founding base of investment in this Galaxy because of its fantastic location. This syndicate has acquired all of the rights to all of the airwaves, brainwaves, thoughts, subliminal space/time, dream-making studios, fantasy rights, impromptu daydream clubs, the blueprints for the “American Dream,” a gated resort community in Los Cabos, and a plush getaway retreat in Barrow, Alaska.

THE BOYFRIEND (who happens to be clad in a classy black three-piece suit, far too overdressed for the dive bar, if you ask me) says, “Hey, man—are you hitting on my lady?”

“What?! Piss off!” says THE REPORTER

THE BOYFRIEND clubs THE REPORTER over the head with his beer mug, knocking him out.

AND NOW THE NARRATIVE DISSOLVES TO:

THIS VERY NOVEL! (work with me, dear reader –- fingers crossed that it’ll make sense when all is said and done)

CHAPTER CALLED (Undercover Repart*: General of Inane to Make Bold Move) *fix spelling

Back in the camp on the outskirts of town, FROWARD MORONI (aka. THE RINGLEADER) is in his camper, going over his speech. He was one of the few who had gained access into the dealings of the New (and Improved) Interstellar Syndicate, because he had once been an esteemed member of their organization. For some time, he was trying to disguise his own plot to “bring down” the Big Shots. He had all his thoughts cloaked and forged, his subliminal mind counterfeited, and his dreams purchased via the black market.

One night, however, a telepathic sweep (of which he was unaware) was conducted over the entire globe. Too bad the sweep occurred while he was in the vulnerable state between sleep and consciousness, and some of his “real” thoughts were picked up on mind-radar. Aware now of his treasonous nature, the trackers for the Really Big Brothers—the hired muscle of the N(aI)IS—mandated a subliminal APB on him. Luckily, he escaped via the “slurred tunnel” (a state of mind in which the subject must find a park bench, ally, or “out of the way” space in any large metropolis and proceed to get blind-stinking drunk. While in this state it is impossible for Mind Scanners to get any clear and accurate description, or reading, of the drunkard’s psyche. They are passed over as inconspicuous inebriates aware of nothing in particular or as nebulous blips on the mind screens…).

While in this condition he maintained a low profile and began conducting sermons to his fellow drunken bums on the underhanded, subversive takeover of their beloved little planet by the Clandestine, interstellar Monopolists. Within the last year he had assembled a small platoon of freshly enlightened, houseless non-materialists, known to most people as “transients” or “bums.”

Perhaps the booze and his intense rigor had finally clouded his realistic judgment of good tactics and strategy (for his ragtag squad entailed a grand total of eleven members; twelve if Mackie (the Lonesome bulldog) were to count), whilst the N(aI)IS had legions of planets and googolplexes of cash at their disposal.

Or maybe a certain reality had manifested itself within his entire mind, body and spirit—the reality in which a person senses inevitable defeat, yet musters up the resolve to squeak out a defiant yelp against the universe: “SCREW YOU ALL!”

THE BLONDE finished reading the excerpt and set the notebook on the table.

Waiting for her reaction to my work-in-progress, and convincing myself I didn’t give a damn what she thought, I examined the empty Mescal bottle, yearning for more.

“It’s not bad. Forward, at times disjointed, a touch sophomoric … But it is a viable report.” She tapped a pencil on the notebook as she finished speaking.

I wasn’t in the mood to listen to a critique of my work. It was garbage, so what difference did it make what anyone else thought?

“It’s not even a viable form of toilet paper, if you ask me,” I said.

“Eddie, this is a very important document. The data veiled with-in this thing is crucial to our cause.” She tapped her pencil on her knee then took to a subtler demeanor. “What you went through to … acquire … this information … is greatly appreciated.”

What the hell was this lady talking about?

I didn’t care for her mind games. Was this broad on the verge of a punch line or was she out of her flipping mind? To that point, my existence had been a dull and listless one at best; nondescript by humanity’s standards.

So what the hell did she want with me? I had freelanced hack jobs, writing cheap fiction for different low-key magazines and one unfinished novel. And when I was really desperate for money I’d do clinical trials for pharmaceutical companies. Other than that, lazy, broke and drunk would’ve been an apt description of me.

I wasn’t a nuisance to anyone and had an implicit agreement with the rest of the world to not bother me.

And now this strange but beautiful lady ended up in my living room talking nonsensical smack about my bullshit “reports” that I barely remember penning because it’s quite probable I was drunk on the job.

I needed a drink.

I WAS sitting on the couch listening to the static-garbled frequencies emanating in my head when the Blonde—who told me her name was Mona—walked back in from the store. She had a brown paper sack in one hand and a huge bottle of Stolichnaya vodka in the other.

She set the bottle down on the table. “I figured you needed this. Although, I don’t condone it. Or think it’s a good idea.”

I nodded in appreciation and walked to the kitchen to get a glass. I then went and sat down at the table, unscrewed the bottle then poured myself a shot.

The Blonde, or Mona, began putting the assortment of groceries into their appropriate places. I sat there and stared at her as she went about her business. How odd that she seemed to possess a complete awareness of my kitchen: a familiarity that only can be achieved by spending a lot of time in or studying a detailed schematic of the place.

I blinked, raised my shot glass and toasted, “To my hospitable hostess. Cheers.”

She grinned (a bit nervously, if you ask me) while I put back another shot. It went down clean and smooth.

After the fourth drink, comfort and looseness settled in again. The static-ridden frequencies in my head had subsided. I was sort of glad this person was at my place; any company—especially attractive company—sometimes beats no company at all. Hell, maybe her presence would jump start the motor to get some more writing done. Plus I was grateful, for she had sponsored my booze-cause for the day.

I poured another one. “I apologize for having blacked out on you last night. And I’m sorry I have no recollection of you at all. But I do appreciate this.”

Mona nodded, sat down across from me and looked square into my eyes. “The reason—well—you have no memory whatsoever is—well—you’ve sort of been….” She tried to find the correct way of phrasing whatever she was trying to say, and nervously doodled with the pencil on a blank page of paper while still looking at me. “It is a very precarious matter.”

I put back the drink. She got up, walked into the kitchen and grabbed a shot glass. She rejoined me at the table and took to a more serious posture, once again her gaze intent upon me. I poured her one as well as another for me.

She placed the shot-glass between her thumb and index finger. “You’re not actually a writer. You’re a double-spy of sorts, employed by the Free-Thought-and-Will-Chapter, to report on certain cells of the N(aI)IS. Your implanted pseudo-ego, however, is in the form of a burned-out writer who is either a genius or sub-talented, depending on his mood, who spends his time scraping for money by being a guinea pig for pharmaceutical companies and drinking booze.”

“Huh. You don’t say….” I said.

She didn’t skip a beat. “Your reports to the Chapter are usually received every few months. You write these reports in the form of short-stories, poems, scripts, and the big one, Planet Fever—your so called “work-in-progress”—as an amalgamation of different formats, which create an encrypted code, which we’ve codenamed ‘My Book of Life.’”

“Fascinating.” I grinned.

She paid no attention to my attempts at smart-assery but kept unfurling her spiel: “We haven’t been able to locate you for a while; we believe the N(aI)IS has stripped your mind of your identity and re-indoctrinated you as your pseudo-ego … as a precautionary measure on their behalf. It was after one of your short stories surfaced in a porno magazine that we were able to find you. I was hoping that at least some of your memory was intact, but it appears they did do a thorough job on you.” She put back her shot and cringed, coughing once.

I was ready for a hearty round of bellowing laughter at any moment. She remained unflinching and quite serious.

“What’s your problem, lady?” I took a deep breath and steadied myself. “All right, I know my writing is garbage. But for you to insult my intelligence and mock me just for your own warped sense of intellectual kicks isn’t worth a bag of groceries and a bottle of booze. Now, you did a damn fine job of parodying something that I would write—and maybe gave me some new ideas—but I think this joke has run its course.”

I put back the shot for good measure.

“I don’t know who the hell you are, or I can’t remember…. I know I’m a drunkard but I know what reality is…. Now, you are more than welcome to stay here and drink with me or you could leave. If you go, the bottle stays.”

She started to say something but bit her lip then smiled, opting to stay. She drank with me, all the while keeping her own booze intake as well as the conversation within the realm of reason: small talk, chitchat, the weather, when I planned to finish the novel…. The entire time she doodled with that damn pencil into one of the blank pages of my notebook, sometimes erasing what she had just doodled.

Her tone was becoming somewhat bothersome: it seemed to suggest she were patronizing me. I felt like a little kid who believed his own fantasies and describes them to his parents as they play along with the game. I couldn’t pin down her angle. A sense of unease crept over my entire being.

The last moments are fuzzy, but I believe I took another shot and passed out.

“YES, MR. BIKAVER, this is all very interesting and amusing, but you’re not getting to the point. You do not seem to believe part of the story—or you are at odds with who your character is, Mr. Bikaver….” The Interrogator’s voice tapers off.

I’m back in the Lay-Z-Boy recliner—nowhere in particular.

“This might be a tad intense, but we’ll skip the formalities of the rest of this particular sequence in time and move to a few years prior. You have been drinking with the girl and flirting with her. In response, her boyfriend has just smashed a beer glass over your head. Now, tell me what happens afterwards….”

My mental projector begins to roll the footage and I travel back to….

…AWAKE.

Sticky barroom floor.

Surrounded by a small group of people and one extraordinarily attractive blonde with big blue eyes.

Had I seen her before?

My head throbbed with a pain worse than any imaginable hangover. The Blonde helped me up. I was convinced I had seen this girl before, perhaps in a dream or déjà vu. Just having been knocked out….

“Sorry, that had to be done.” Her voice reverberated within my head. “We think they might be on to you—never mind now—c’mon.”

She pushed a bottle of liquor into my hand and led me by the arm up some stairs. A warm stream of sweat—or blood—curved down my face. We scampered into a storage room.

I looked into a mirror.

I looked terrible.

A huge, bleeding welt was ballooning on my upper-left forehead. An incessant ringing, accompanied by a police-like APB radio call, echoed in my head. Any form of speech sputtered forth from my mouth as incoherent babble. The Blonde doused the head wound with alcohol, then tossed some gauze and tape over it. She stripped me naked then re-clothed me in reeking transient grab that smelled like the inside of an elephant’s ass. My mind reeled and popped and spun and received strange radio transmissions. My entire body ached. If it weren’t for the raw pain, I would’ve thought this was all a bad dream.

We went down the stairs and out the back door.

The cold, night rain splashing on my head refreshed my aching frontal lobe. We walked in silence until we arrived at a lakeside park, where she sat me down on a bench.

“See you soon,” she whispered.

And the Blonde was gone.

I tried to think, but thinking at this point was futile.

No recollection of past, a vague conception of present, and didn’t care to endeavor an ounce of thought into the future.

The bottle of liquor she had given me was still in my coat pocket. I twisted off the cap and drank, then curled up on the bench as the rain continued its cool, diligent massage on my confused soul.

I WOKE up on the park bench. It was sunny and early in the morning. Miscellaneous people, out for their morning lakeside stroll, showed an obvious, despotic disdain for my dingy presence as they passed by. To them—and to me, so it seemed—I was a drunken vagrant. The leather boots on my feet looked as though they had been run over by Irwin Rommel’s entire Panzer division back in 1942, were found in the North African desert a half-century later, shipped over to the U.S. then slipped onto my feet. My pants seemed to be fashioned from a dirt/fabric hybrid and smelled of stale piss. The grubby, butterfly-collared shirt I wore appeared as though it had been discarded in 1978. To top it off, I had on a dusty, olive green corduroy jacket and a hat made out of straw. I clutched an empty bottle of vodka in my left hand.

My mouth felt like a long-forgotten septic tank. My head felt as though it was ready to explode at any moment.

I sat there for a while and listened to the birds converse with one another.

A peculiar-looking gentleman made his approach from across the park. He was clad in a black top hat, white button-up shirt, baggy white pants (tucked into black, knee high boots), and a red overcoat. He looked like a classic circus ringleader. Leashed in front of him trotted a medium-sized, stout bulldog, attired in WWII American bomber pilot regalia: jacket, helmet and goggles—all custom-fitted for the beast.

Both the dog and he grinned during their entire approach.

He sat down next to me and exhaled a huge, content sigh. Clearing his throat, he turned to face me. “Froward Moroni’s the name: General and friend of the legion of insane, inane, disdained, unclaimed, un-reigned, untamed, deranged, rearranged, out-of-range, mundane, profane, lame, and not to forget: humane. This here is my second in command, best friend to woman and man, and always willing to make a stand for the good-guy’s band: Mackie—the Lonesome Bulldog!

Moroni gave an exaggerated ovation as the dog looked about and wagged its backside. The dog’s tongue dangled, showering the sidewalk with slobber.

MORONI INVITED me to join him for “The Greatest Cause Humanity, and at least two-thirds of the Milky Way Galaxy, Will Have Ever Known!” He didn’t endeavor into the particulars of that “Cause” at the time, but he did promise “food and entertainment a-plenty; conversation, camaraderie without a … bounty.” He then cursed himself for not finding a better word than “bounty” to fulfill his rhyming scheme.

I followed him to where his motorcycle—with sidecar—was parked. Mackie hopped up into the sidecar. Moroni mounted the cycle and I climbed on behind him. He tossed his top hat in with the dog then fired up the bike.

Off we went.

About 20 minutes later, we pulled into a shanty-camp situated in some isolated hills in the vast wilderness area of Los Angeles’ Griffith Park. Other characters meandered about the camp, cooking, singing, painting, boozing, snoozing, and cavorting. We climbed off the vehicle, Moroni re-donned his hat, and then began introducing me to various members of his clan.

A couple of guys sat at a picnic table playing chess. “This here is Fred Fillono: the finest cinematic artist ever … greater than he there have never been, are, nor will be—never.”

Fillono tipped his brimmed hat in salutation.

Moroni continued. “Ah—and here in our camp we have Marcel the Champ: painter and sculptor for fun … grandmaster of chess who will reign victorious over and then humbly give his thanks to just about anyone….”

The Champ stood up, performed an exaggerated bow and shook my hand.

Moroni pointed at me. “Yes, sure—and you, my good sir, please do not be shy … give us your moniker and what you do, by-the-by….”

Loose shards of memory were attempting to surface in my head. “My name … is Bikaver. I think I’m a writer….”

“Bravo! Just what we need: a scribe, Reality Author, court recorder ye shall be … well, then this shall fit the bill—ahh yes—here is your hallowed pencil.” He brandished a pencil from his coat pocket and handed it to me. On the side were inscribed the letters “F-T-W-C.” He gave me an extravagant wink.

I gave him my thanks.

I WILLINGLY joined this band of transients and ingratiated myself as Moroni had invited. While we were a bevy of transients, we invited various other vagrants who happened to be endowed with any form of creative nature into our little raggedy troupe.

Moroni manned the helm of the ship as its captain and spokesperson—its “top dog.”

Many spiels on the virtues of free thought issued forth from the man: free thinkers—being painters, musicians, philosophers, writers, poets, playwrights, mimes, performance artists, and stunt-men (Moroni’s own words)—were in fact civilization’s only hope for survival. “For it is they….” he would exclaim, “who are least likely to be brainwashed by the corporate-mass-media-manipulation melee…! We are, indeed, on the brink; I am because I think, if I have nary my own thought—then I am naught.”

His “fire-sideways chats” every Saturday night were delivered with the fervor of a fire-and-brimstone preacher or the classic military dictator’s zeal. His dictums covered everything from unknown enemies, varying means of mind-control, false realities, and the systematic duping, doping and dumbing-down of the human race to the fact that our kitchen sinks were spying on us.

We listened respectfully, but didn’t take seriously his wild pronouncements.

He was our ringleader, in charge of the entertainment and festivities. For us, his vast and incessant paranoia—which fueled his fine rants—was part of the show. We detected neither menace nor danger from the man, quite the contrary: upon his initiative and leadership, a viable forum for transient artists to share with one another time, camaraderie, companionship and entertainment had been achieved. We had become a tribe, a family, a roving band of misfit artists. And we would present our works regularly.

Upon the seventeenth of every other month, Fillono projected one of his films via a hand-cranked projector. A common theme that ran throughout his oeuvre of work was that of mind-manipulation via higher powers upon an unknowing protagonist or group of protagonists. Every single one of his movies contained a character called “The Telepathic Ventriloquist,” played by the dashing and youthful actor Lethan O’Leery, whose outright cynicism was eclipsed only by his love of whiskey, which was far eclipsed by his handsome young Paul Newman looks. Why hadn’t Lethan O’Leery gone “mainstream” and become a big screen “heartthrob?” His theory (in his genteel North Carolina accent): “Because I ain’t nobbed the gatekeeper. And I ain’t ever gonna.”

Each eve of Mercury’s “retrograde” cycle, Marcel “The Champ” unveiled a new painting or sculpture. Why Mercury’s retrograde cycle? “Because it happens about three or four times a year, and not always at the same time. So it is fixed, but not too fixed. That way I have a schedule, but not too tight.”

Did he subscribe to the “astrological” nuances of the cycles? “Eh, I don’t know about all that. Maybe things go haywire, maybe not. The universe is a very large place, maybe the biggest, and perhaps a butterfly flapping its wings in Havana can eventually cause a supernova in the Andromeda galaxy. Who knows? Not me.”

His most notorious painting, “Naked Business Woman Descending Upon an Escalator,” raised quite a few eyebrows, particularly because it looked like a time-lapsed film of a naked woman on an escalator, but all the frames of the film were superimposed atop one another, so you couldn’t really tell what it was. But if you looked closely (perhaps like those pictures where if you stare at it just the right way you might see something) you could see that the woman was in fact flipping off Gill Bates, the billionaire behind the Macrohard software behemoth.

His most controversial sculpture—a tipped-over, portable outhouse with “American Standard (Capsized)” spray painted in gold color on the door—garnered kudos from the underground “low-brow” art crowd, while causing the pompous New York art “establishment” to hold their noses, most likely because he had used a quite uncleaned outhouse for the show.

When not painting or sculpting, he would be found schooling someone in a round of chess and saying, “thank you very much for a pleasant game” after check mate.

Chuck the “Born Again Poet” recited his eclectic rants and guttural takes on reality, the universe, God, freedom, booze, drugs, women, cash, technology, and dog racing; many times decipherable only between his rusty and roaring fits of cigarette induced coughing and powerful and violent bouts of 99-cent-store-wine-provoked projectile vomiting.

The sultry and bosom-heavy Lustra Love-Joy caused uncontrollable “libido-sensitive epileptic seizures” in all of the male and some of the female portion of the audience upon each showing of her ever-evolving, quite suggestive and hyper-erotic performance art she entitled “the OM”(Orgasmic Movements).

This is the way it went for about a year. None of us considered for a moment the highly intelligent Moroni to be dangerous. His speeches had an entrancing manner; the impassioned yet inane dictums mesmerized the group as though a mass hypnosis were occurring. I began to take notice that all of us would inject Moroni’s pronouncements thematically into each of our respective works—as though he were the storm cloud and our artworks the raindrops manifested therefrom.

“I am the planet of ideas, and you are all my satellites.”

“The world is in a state of fever. I am the doctor and you are all my orderlies.”

“People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs. I am the top dog. Fight for a few underdogs anyway.”

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page. You all are my pages.”

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing you.”

“I alone cannot change the world, but I can cannonball into the pool and cause many ripples. You all are my ripples.”

He encouraged us to go out and sell, display, perform and present our respective forms of art, “because, you see—not even thoughts, anymore, are free.” Our transient troupe trekked to various towns and cities around the region—a traveling low-brow hobo show—presenting, performing, displaying and selling to anyone who had the time and wherewithal to oblige us…. It was a pretty decent set up.

I FILLED up a number of notebooks with material during my twelve-month stint with the “troupe.” In my mind, Moroni was a man whose imagination dwarfed his rationale, but an inspirational force to “we the wretchedly refused.” He motivated us to be more than just bums, which is what we were.

The man had passion. His fervor insinuated itself in us.

We called ourselves “Free Thought and Will Champions.” We had turned into a viable band, surviving off the hospitality and donations from philanthropic hosts and selling to those who had an appreciation for “the lowest of the low arts”—as Moroni mused.

My job as a reporter or recorder: to pen exposés chronicling the goings-on of our group, and record virtually everything Moroni had said.

And write stories.

I sold one fictional story (Fillono and I co-wrote) to an underground literary magazine. We both worked on the screenplay; he turned the screenplay into a film and I into a short story.

The gist of the yarn: The Telepathic Ventriloquist sits up on the stage with his dummy and stares at the audience in stark silence.

Neither he nor the dummy ever move their mouths: through telepathy he prompts his audience into laughter.

The ventriloquist’s act gains more and more notoriety.

In the end, however, the ventriloquist learns he is but a stooge for a company testing out its new mind-control device. The device had been planted within the dummy, which needs a human conduit to allow it to work.

The ventriloquist becomes aware he himself is the conduit through which his audience becomes brainwashed into purchasing a new brand of mouthwash.

The climax of the film occurs when he performs “his” now popular act, and during the performance he breaks character and directly notifies the audience of what is going on. The crowd believes his speech to be a new part of his show, and laughs more so. Finally, aware of his predicament, he smashes the dummy into pieces. The audience boos him and collectively leaves.

The final shot of Fillono’s film is, in my opinion far more expressive than the end of my story. He leaves us with a slow zoom-out of the ventriloquist, sitting under a lone spotlight, into a wide-shot of him gazing into the vast empty venue in desolate silence.

The film was projected in a dozen or so art house theaters and garnered critical acclaim.

My short story netted me $250 from the underground publication Buck Naked Truth.

The last piece I had been working on during my time with Moroni—to the best of my recollection—was called “Undercover Repart: General of Inane to Make Bold Move.” I remember that, because I knew I needed to fix the spelling of “Report,” but I hadn’t been able to get around to it for reasons which will be mentioned later. It was to be Moroni’s tell-all speech in which he was going to give us the unadulterated, unabridged and mind-blowing account of his real identity and the actuality of his intentions.

“Everything is in place … for a declaration of war on them by us—the human race … SCREW YOU ALL!” That is how the repart—I mean report—ends.

I WAS in my stand-up tent, flipping through my report. I didn’t like how the piece ended. As a matter of fact, the work on the whole sucked. I felt as though nothing had really been accomplished, and the entire year had been blown accomplishing that nothingness.

Was I akin to Fillono’s Telepathic Ventriloquist? A mere “yes-man” acting as a bestooged conduit for use by manipulative higher forces?

Probably.

A mind-storm erupted on the scale of a psychic el niño. A diligent revision of my work-in-progress was in order. With this revision I took my own liberties and added my very own thoughts to the piece.

For one, I made the fact quite lucid that Moroni was an insane man. I implemented myself into the piece as a spy, in the guise of a writer who works for some unknown (or undisclosed) agency, sent to investigate and report on the activities of the man known as Moroni.

Secondly, I made myself out to be the hero, saving the planet from Moroni’s underhanded madness.

And lastly, a love interest was introduced. I was, after all, beg-inning to feel lonesome and in need of female contact.

“Ah, Mr. Bikaver … I see and I lurk, you are going about your work.” Moroni staggered into my tent with a bottle of wine in one hand and an attaché in the other. He pushed the bottle into my chest and sat down in a fold-out camping chair across from me. “May I check upon wh-what—may I read your stuff?”

I took a big pull off the wine and handed him the papers. He opened up the attaché case, brandished a bottle of Schnapps, closed the case, uncapped the Schnapps and got to reading.

For about an hour he read; every now and then he laughed aloud or clapped together his hands, exclaiming “bravo!” and sipping from his bottle.

In the meantime, I polished off the entire bottle of wine; it was smooth, dry and bitter.

He finished reading as he finished the Schnapps. “Exemplary. I couldn’t have penned it better myself. Every word is true, through-and-through and through you!” He leaned back in the chair,examined the empty bottle, then set it on the ground. “You have graduated from the academy of Free Thought and Will Champions—with honors, of course…. However, Mr. Bikaver, after tonight you will no longer be able to spy on me. Our tenure of merriment ends upon this eve, and it will not be a pleasant scene. First, we will be disbanded when a rude raid by an N(aI)IS Black Ops Really-Big-Brothers Attack Squad transpires. What is the N(aI)IS, you wonder? Here is a detailed account of them I have been saving to give to you on this very night. You must re-write it pronto as fictional code within this—your novel-in-progress—then burn the original.” He opened up the attaché case again and slid a dossier across the table. It looked like pages of extensive governmental bureaucratic documents. My stomach was beginning to ache.

“Second, you will be knocked senseless when one of these commandos rams the butt of his rifle to the back of your head. This, of course will have given you partial amnesia, whereupon you will have remembered very little about the past year, but you will have slowly regained your memory of your identity—particularly of who you were prior to the faithful day you met up with me. Of course, you will still have your written works. To you, however, these works will be hazy aide memoirs you had written when you were a confused drunk. If you’ll excuse me, I must now prepare for my finale speech.”

He stood, bowed, winked then trotted toward the door of the tent. He paused and abruptly turned back to face me. “Oh—does ‘A-to-Z-all-ways’ mean anything to you?”

“Huh?”

He shrugged his shoulders then exited the tent.

I sat there—bewildered—and gazed at the empty wine bottle.

THE TROUPE of vagrants (including Mackie, the Lonesome Bulldog) had assembled and awaited Moroni’s apparently last opus. Moroni had pulled out all the stops for this one—his grand finale speech. A stage with a podium was assembled. On both sides of the platform were amplifiers stacked to fifteen feet. A video camera and lighting faced the stage. A white, news-like van with a satellite dish propped on top was parked in the back.

Moroni was in the van.

The lights came up as circus music boomed through the amps. Moroni’s voice, in the manner of a vaudevillian stage host, cut in: “Ladies and Gentlemen—allow the madness to proceed, as Froward Moroni gives his End-Of-the-World (as we know it)wrap up!”

Pre-recorded, canned stadium applause nearly blew out the speakers, as well as our eardrums.

Moroni exited the van and strolled to the stage like an exaggerated nobleman. He had clad himself in a highly decorated World-War II four-starred General’s regalia like George S. Patton.

He gripped the podium and waited for the pre-recorded applause to die down.

“This time I have gone too far!” his voice echoed from the speakers. “Filing a declaration of war against the New (and Improved) Interstellar Syndicate at this point is akin to riding into battle on a mule and wielding nothing but a fork against a Roman legion. The New (and Improved) Interstellar Syndicate (or N(aI)IS) is a subversive, high-powered clandestine group who controls the planet earth as well as its moon, owns land on Venus, Mars, various moons of Saturn and has interest in a small section of the Andromeda galaxy. These nameless, faceless yet affluent and powerful barons are attempting to expand their market into the Milky Way. Our planet is to be their founding base of investment. As of right now, this entity owns all the rights to all the airwaves, brainwaves, thoughts, subliminal circuits, dream-making production companies, fantasy material, impromptu daydream clubs, blueprints for the American Dream, Antarctica, condos in Cabo, and a plush getaway retreat in Barrow, Alaska.

“I am not who you think I am. As a matter of fact, I am as treasonous as the N(aI)IS, for I have been working on all of your brains, in order to ‘free them up.’ During the year we have been together, you all have had new thought parameters installed, your subliminal circuits counterfeited and your subconscious wetware reprogrammed. Unbeknownst to yourselves, you are all now ‘free-agents’, able to entertain free thought and free will as you please. Too bad after tonight all of your memories will be, in some way or another, altered so that you will have mostly forgotten our tenure together. Do not be afraid, soldiers—you are free now. You will again hear my voice in the future….”

Moroni stared out to all of us. Some wiped tears from their bleary eyes, while others, like myself stood dumbfounded and on the verge of a fit of nervous laughter.

“And now it is time….” The speakers began to reverberate. The lights began to glow. Moroni’s voice permeated throughout an intergalactic expanse of space. I could perceive his voice saturate itself into my own mind.

“I, FROWARD MORONI OF THE F.T.W.C. DO HEREBY DECLARE ALL-OUT INTERSTELLAR WAR ON THE INSURGENT ENTITY KNOWN AS THE NEW (and IMPROVED) INTERSTELLAR SYNDICATE ON THE GROUNDS OF GALACTIC TREASON AND FOR ATTEMPTING TO TAKE CONTROL OF THE INALIENABLE RIGHTS OF ALL THE SENSES OF ALL SENTIENT BEINGS … COME ON, BABY…. TAKE ME ON, AND SCREW YOU ALL!”

He raised both his fists into the air. A huge explosion ensued, cutting out the electricity, leaving us all in the dark.

Complete silence, aside from the conversation of a few crickets and the flap of the tents in a slight breeze, trailed.

From a distance began a low rumbling noise, building in volume. For a few moments we stood and heard the subtle, mechanical symphony grow into a robust orchestration of what we soon learned was a small armada of dark-colored helicopters.

As the choppers encircled our camp, smoke bombs landed on us. Sheer chaos followed. Through the smoke I witnessed the vague silhouettes of the perpetrators, running at us from all directions. Men wearing three-piece-suits and gas masks, wielding submachine guns. Aside from Mackie the Lonesome Bulldog (who barked and snatched at pant legs and got kicked around like a large soccer ball) and Lustra Love-Joy (who writhed and undulated in some sort of trance-sexual dance), we all remained still, benumbed with astonishment. I was a pair of stunned eyeballs embedded in a dense flesh statue. The well-dressed commandos ran around smashing and burning anything and everything into bits. The amps, lights, van windows, tents, campers, Fillono’s 16mm camera, the stage, podium, Champ’s sculptures: all destroyed with reckless abandon.

“Where is Moroni?” a gas-masked voice abruptly interrupted.

“Huh?”

I believe one of his associates rammed the butt of his gun into the back of my head, rendering me unconscious.

ONCE AGAIN, I woke up not knowing where I was.

The place looked like a hospital room, or maybe a prison cell. Everything was immaculate and white, including the padded steel door. I was on a soft cot-like bed. My mind in a cloudy haze, thoughts formed into something tangible only to disperse into a formless nebula.

A lady’s voice similar to one over the loudspeaker at an airport cut into the room, thwarting me from my daydream. “Welcome back to the A-to-Z Research and Clinical Trials Center. To ensure a somewhat pleasant stay, we recommend you follow our instructions. Be dutiful, please. Thank you.”

She instructed me to sit in a chair and face a video screen, which had appeared on a wall from behind automated receding doors. I was told to relax, which I knew was going to be tough because the chair was of the metallic fold-out variety specifically designed to be uncomfortable. But I’d give it my best shot.

A woman’s face came up onto the screen, the type of face that could be seen in a car commercial or behind the reception desk at a large Wall Street firm—at least how I imagined the reception desk. Plain but pretty, in a business-like fashion.

“Edward P. Bikaver,” the face on the screen addressed me. “Do you have any questions?”

“What’s going on? Why am I here? Who the hell are you?”

She smiled. “We are going to do some psychic exercises and subconscious rehabilitation in order for you to go back into the world and operate as a functional human being.”

It was clear I wasn’t going to get any solid answers from this lady.

“During this program, please do not direct your attention away from the screen,” she said.

“Uh-huh,” I mumbled.

Intricate patterns and fractal geometric designs twirled on the screen. I watched with my mouth agape. When I sensed drool cross the threshold of the lip, I figured I was then hypnotized.

My thoughts converged upon the form of a blond-haired, blue-eyed girl. A yearning swelled up within me: to be with her … to touch her … to kiss her … etc.

The screen lit up: right there on the screen was the blonde of my thoughts and a swarthy-looking gentleman. The guy was a suave, embellished romantic caricature of me: his hair slicked back and gelled into a pompadour and his silken shirt open at the top, revealing an absurdly hairy chest. The two stood on a veranda on a cliff overlooking an oceanic sunset. They gazed into each another’s eyes, their faces drawing toward each other.

I thought about kissing the girl; as I did so, the caricature on screen drew the girl into himself and embellished an exaggerated kiss of her. After the seemingly eternal smooch, he leered into her eyes and said (with a quasi-French accent): “Your eyes are the ocean of the universe … and I, standing atop the cliff of loneliness and despair … plunge into your eyeballs to be rescued by your heart….”

Bile rose from the pit of my gut due to the overwhelming sense of loathing and nausea at what my eyes beheld on the screen. Picture a sleazy romance novel adapted to a cheap soap-operatic version for the screen and you would be peering into my alleged soul. The source of the cheese? Apparently, my own thoughts.

I tried not to think. As I did so, another caricatured version of myself came on-screen. This one a blithering dolt, eyes closed, who sat in a meditative, lotus position and repeated to himself, “Just don’t think … just don’t think … just don’t think….”

I thought: “This is torture.”

Another scene came up: yet another caricature (also resembling me, but dressed up in 1910 prison garb) having cigars extinguished on various part of his anatomy and his nose-hairs plucked, getting slap-jacked, cattle-prodded, tickled, racked in the nuts, pinched, kicked, and head-butted by a bevy of military-clad men resembling high-ranking SS officers. The scene—though violent—had the feel of a slapstick-styled farce a la The Three Stooges. My portrayer twisted, agonized and yelled with a vaudevillian/silent film embellishment and the only thing missing from the torturers were curled, villainous pencil mustaches. I watched with complete disgust.

Every thought of mine turned into an exaggerated caricature on the screen. All my thoughts were subject to a diligent mockery, one that I could not escape.

Perhaps to think of myself as a member of an audience who might be watching my thoughts display themselves on a screen—yes, that would work.

This attempt was in vain, for before me I viewed an image of myself staring at an image of myself staring at an image of myself ad infinitum….

I gave up.

After bearing witness to a number of z-grade movie scenes derived from aspirations, yearnings, past, present, dreams, fantasies and whatever else my brain could muster up, I hit upon one of the greatest sanctuaries the human being was capable of—I fell asleep.

The psycho-cinematic screening had finally come to an end.

IN SURREAL flight, I (or at least my sub-consciousness) floated through clouds of fractal geometric designs. I glided downward toward a building. Rather than crashing into it, I passed through the roof and hovered into an office, where I recall catching a quick glimpse of myself seated in a recliner, and someone sitting in a chair next to me jotting down notes.

As I said, it was a quick glimpse, for the next thing I knew I jettisoned into a surge of electrical combustion, into the body (my body) on the recliner whereupon my (or his) consciousness and sub-consciousness collided at a threshold of awareness.

A man’s voice counted down from ten to one. When he reached one, my eyes opened.

Sitting across from me, a guy with a bushy white Mark Twain mustache peered into my eyes. We were in an office, the one I had just glimpsed. His gaze bore through my skull. He grinned.

“Vell, Meester Beekavfer, dat vas ein gut und produkteev session. I feel dat vee are progreseeng very vell,” he said in a heavy German, or Austrian, or perhaps Swiss accent.

I blinked. He perceived my lack of knowing what the hell was going on and winked.

“You vill be deesoriented for avile. Dee combeenation of dee peels und dee heepnosees go so far eento your psychee dat your own brain forgets dee aktual reealeetee ven you avake. Soh don’t vorry, you veel bee up und runneeng een no time…. Do you have anee qvestions?”

I blinked again. I thought of quite a few questions. Questions, at this point, were futile.

“Veree vell…. Heer ist your preescreeption, und don’t forget to take zhem.” He handed me the slip of paper as we walked to the door. He placed his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t vorry. Everyteeng veel be A-OK. Ahh yes, een kase you run eentoo eemergencee again, here ist mein kard.”

He handed me the card and we shook hands.

“I veel kall upon you venn you must come too ouwer next session.” He winked again.

I gave him my thanks.

I walked out of the building in a state of confusion. The sky was overcast and I could smell impending rain. As I staggered down the walkway, a blond-haired girl—her gaze intent upon me—approached.

“Well, how’d it go?”

I had no clue who this person was, though her demeanor suggested that we were well acquainted, if not intimate. I thought I was out of my mind.

“Dr. Götzefalsch told me you’d be disoriented for awhile. How do you feel?”

I was at a thorough loss of answering her question. I had nothing to compare anything to as far as feeling. At that particular moment in time, I didn’t know what feeling meant.

“C’mon, let’s go get something to eat.” She grabbed me by the arm and led me to a parking lot. We climbed into a Toyota pick-up truck. She put the key in and turned. The engine purred. She ground the clutch into first gear. As she let off the gas, the vehicle sprang into motion. Completely mistiming the next shift, she forced it into second. Though I was oblivious to everything that was going on with me, I knew one thing: this woman had no clue how to drive a stick.

“Easy, you’re gonna ruin the clutch!”

“I told you I can’t drive these things. Why couldn’t you own an automatic?”

I SAT in the truck—my truck—as the Blonde walked into the cheap burger joint to get us some food. I pulled out my wallet and examined my driver’s license. The bloated, drained man in the photograph bared little resemblance to the thin, sort-of healthy looking face in the mirror. The two looked similar only in the eyes, hair color and a slight look of sad confusion on their faces. The license had been issued a few years prior. Must’ve been going through some rough times, I thought.

I tucked the license back and noticed a crisp twenty-dollar bill sleeping in the billfold. A liquor store across the street happened to catch my eye.

I came out with a 750 ml bottle of Smirnoff, a bottle of Chilean red wine, and a corkscrew; maybe the girl might like the wine.

Back in the truck, the cap to the vodka came off with ease and the liquid went right down my throat. A warm, mild shudder passed over me. I opened the glove box and a pile of cassette tapes careened out. On one was a label that read “The Thought Police: Art B. Well’s Take on Real Reality.” It got tossed back into the glove box. Johnny Cash’s The Mystery of Life, Neil Diamond’s Solitary Man, Nevermind by Nirvana, as well as some others that had no labels, went back into the glove box as well. Mozart’s Magic Flute slid into the old tape deck. Through one clean speaker and one blown one, Mozart’s genius flowed out.

That was nice. I felt at ease.

“YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO DRINK WHILE YOU’RE ON THOSE PILLS!”

The abruptness of her statement thwarted me from my flute intoxication bliss. I took another pull from the bottle and dialed the volume on the deck up. She reached over and turned the music off.

“You son-of-a-bitch! What the hell are you trying to do, kill yourself?!” She got in and tossed the burgers onto the seat next to me.

I stared at the dashboard, completely silent.

What the hell was I trying to do? Hard to know that when you don’t know who the hell you are or what the hell’s going on….

“You’re something else. You think this is some sort of story where you are the tortured character! You believe you’re a tormented soul writing your own life’s misgivings to the world, as though your own anguish negates your mess-ups. You don’t give a shit: you’re so self-absorbed in your own situation you don’t even care what goes on around you or who is affected … I try to get you some help and you piss it all on booze!” She started the vehicle.

This wasn’t going as anticipated. She was supposed to come back with the food, appreciate the bottle of Chilean wine, feel a deep connection with my artistic spirit, be impressed with the fact that I liked Mozart and the day was going to get real romantic and legendary.

That was how my pathetic and delusional mind had envisioned it going.

Back at the place (apparently, my place), we weren’t saying much to one another. She sat on the couch and flipped through a red spiral notebook, either doodling or jotting stuff down with a partially worn down pencil.

I went to take a piss.

As I was pissing, I figured I’d take care of a shit that had been culminating. I finished my business and reached for the toilet paper. On the spool was a dry cardboard cylinder; no wiping paper existed on the roll whatsoever. I leaned over and opened up the sink cupboard: the only tenants therein were a mini plunger, a bottle of sodium hydroxide, a daddy-long legs spider and a small pile of magazines.

“That answers the question whether or not the Blonde lives with me.” I figured she didn’t, because if she did, there would definitely be spare toilet paper.

I grabbed one of the magazines—a Penthouse—ripped out a couple of pages and folded then rubbed them into softness. I wiped, flushed and walked out of the bathroom.

She watched me as I walked toward the table. About a quarter of the vodka was left. I sat down, took the bottle and drank right out of it, then leaned back to analyze this scenario.

“You know, if I didn’t feel you had some sort of potential, I wouldn’t even care to waste my time on you.” She shook her head.

I finished the bottle and put the cap back on.

“We’re out of fuel,” I stated.

“What do you want?” She stood up.

“I want something to drink.”

“Of course you want something to drink. That’s your character defect. You’re supposed to want something to drink. Don’t you get it?!”

Actually, I didn’t. I didn’t get one damn thing.

She approached and sat down across from me at the table. Her eyes would not lock off mine. What to say to her? What was transpiring with me? I was staring at a math equation everyone else seemed to know the answer to but I couldn’t figure it out. I was an exemplary profile of an amnesiac: tiny shards of memory and identifications would surface to my consciousness only to fade back into an abyss of forgetfulness.

“All right. I know that I want a drink. Right now, that’s about all I can think of. One thing, though: what is it exactly that you want?”

She took her eyes off me and looked down at the table. After moments of deliberation, she said, “I just want you to understand … to be okay….”

She was compassionate, that’s for sure.

My mind was restless. Disorientation and lack of awareness will do that…. If I couldn’t figure out who I was, who she was, and what was going on, how could I formulate the means by which to be okay? All there was to work with were the fragmented slivers of tangible memories.

And far too many drunken stupors.

“I don’t know if I know you…. I can’t remember your name and you act as if we were a deal … I’m not quite sure … if I am making—or can make—any sense….”

“Of course.” She touched my cheek sweetly and somehow I think I felt okay.

THE BLONDE grabbed the red notebook she had been reading and doodling in earlier, opened it and handed it to me. I recognized the writing as my own short hand.

The following is an excerpt from a work-in-progress entitled “Planet Fever.” Handwriting matches that of Edward Bikaver

The American Standard is a Toilet. But that is not part of the story. This is:

In a dark and ominous room, seated around a large heavy oak table are serious and stern men wearing stiff black three-piece suits. At the head of the table is seated the NEW NARRATOR/DICTATOR (aka PHOS ATOMOS PARADOSI)

The NEW NARRATOR/DICTATOR (aka PHOS ATOMOS PARADOSI) grips either side of the table and leans forward. “Ahem—the commission has concluded that this planet is, in fact vulnerable to electronic/psychotronic warfare from within and without. ‘Twould be a relatively simple venture: computer attacks could shut down communications as well as major power grids. This means all televisions, radios, electronic credit, on-line services, gas pumps, scanner machines, RADAR units, video game machines, automated tellers, microwave ovens, GPS systems, computers, plug-in sex toys, missile tracking systems, Las Vegas—in other words, the very essence of their civilization and culture—could verily be shut down and then “rescued” then monopolized….”

The rest of the men at the table nod in agreement.

The NEW NARRATOR/DICTATOR (aka PHOS ATOMOS PARADOSI) slams his fist on the table. “But there is a rogue element hiding out, a RAT who can usurp our plans. Find him and use him for devious purposes then discard him like a used rubber on the outskirts of Tijuana. That’ll be all.”

The story CUTS TO:

The interior of a cheap one-room apartment in a rather run-down part of Hollywood, California.

BIKAVER sits on his futon couch reading the newspaper and drinking cheap beer. A knock on the door. BIKAVER sips his beer then sets it on the coffee table in front of him. “It’s open!”

The door swings open and standing at the threshold is the BLONDE—no make-up, blue eyes, soft lips: simplistic beauty.

“Hi, Mr. Bikaver, you’ve been expecting me, no doubt….” she says.

She walks toward ME (I mean BIKAVER), sits next to him and crosses her legs. She takes out a cigarette, lights it and begins to smoke.

“I missed you after you ran out of the bar last time,” she says.

It must be noted that BIKAVER is tense and in slight shock, elucidated by the nervous tapping upon his knee of a stubby pencil he has grabbed off the coffee table.

“How the hell did you find me? I thought after I switched stories, themes, genre … I mean hell—this is a story within a story; I figured that would definitely toss you off my scent.”

The BLONDE exhales cigarette smoke. “Eddie, you are not in control here. I’m not in control. It is, in fact the fate of this plot-line—no matter the story, theme, genre or format—that we be together. They want us together, don’t you see? Relax and be a content character. I’m here to help you.”

“That’s a lie. You’ve been sent here as a spy to infiltrate and sabotage my—I mean this—story.”

The BLONDE stuffs her cigarette into the half-empty can of beer that Eddie had yet to finish. “This is not your story, Mr. Bikaver. Don’t you understand the big picture? You’re not the only one living here—there are other characters here besides you to help evolve and accomplish this tale. Your place is crucial—both as author and character—to the outcome, but this universe does not revolve around you. You revolve within it.”

Eddie’s consciousness suddenly drifts out of his body, out of his apartment, above the city, upward, off the planet, out of the solar-system, out of the Milky Way, out of the known Universe.

“I remember writing that. I can at times remember you. But chronology of time is … hazy and scattered at best….” I rubbed my head.

“Just take it easy, Eddie … you have enough intelligence to over-come this mental oppression. Remember, I am here to help you. You will have to trust me.”

I thought about the word trust.

Trust, at this point seemed irrelevant. Whether I trusted anyone or not, the world, the powers that be, this gal, the doctor, or whoever the hell was running the show were going to do what they wanted with respect to me. All I could do was ride along and try to guess what was coming up next. The company of the Blonde was greatly appreciated, that I knew.

She sensed my appreciation and returned it with a smile.

FOR TWO and a half months the Blonde (who had “reminded” me her name was Mona on more than a few occasions) and I spent “quality” time together: going out, hanging out, making out and simply enjoying each other’s company. I liked her, and she liked me.

Day by day the loose shards of memory and fragments of my identity re-interconnected, little by little, making the picture of my life’s jigsaw puzzle more lucid.

Mona and I had met in a bar a few years back. She had found our conversation to be strange and fascinating, but abruptly cut short by her jealous boyfriend’s beer mug thumping my head, which rendered me unconscious.

That’s right. He wore a black three-piece suit. I never thought I had a chance with her; maybe that’s why I seemed comfortable talking to her, because I wasn’t even trying to pick up on her. But he figured otherwise. That’s why he cold-cocked me with the beer mug. What was a guy in a suit doing in a dive bar anyway?

“He had issues.” That was the extent of Mona’s assessment of her former beau. After the knockout, Mona broke it off with him and decided to take a chance on me for reasons I still can’t comprehend.

Anyway, the trauma of that blow later induced randomly recurring blackouts and hallucinations. That’s what was wrong with me: the hallucinations and delusions were so vivid, my mind was convinced they were valid aspects of lived reality, as though dreams and waking life were integrated. My time with Moroni. My drunken stupors. My work-in-progress. And of course, Mona.

When the mind cannot decipher between “reality” and “non-reality,” the human being winds up in very lame circumstances. If everything is real, then nothing is real (because nothing is included with everything). Such trivial paradoxes are rather amusing philosophically; to actually place a living, breathing, thinking, shitting, eating, rationalizing, linear time-oriented critter into such a circumstance causes great discomfort to that critter.

Simply put: it ain’t fun.

My notebooks were journals of both physical and psychological aspects of my life. They were, in a sense part of my “therapy,” allowing me to document my everyday existence. When read (by myself or someone else) as an objective log of my daily life’s events, my own shift from “reality” to “fictional reality” became apparent. The goal, obviously, was to grasp and maintain awareness of the difference between these “realities” and “fictional realities.”

Prior to having been knocked into a life of perpetual confusion, I had been a mediocre writer who had spent his time scrounging for money and drinking booze. After the blow in the bar, I had become (according to the recorded writings) some sort of covert operative working to subvert a world-domineering entity that controlled the entire human race via subliminal, economical, political, philosophical, educational, sociological, psychological, spiritual, mathematical, irrational, unnatural and vital means.

My façade was as a drunken bum.

“No one would ever think twice about a bum!” my journal read. “When flooded with alcohol, all neural roads and byways become inaccessible or downright treacherous. Their brain-scans are almost impossible to conduct—like going to a mountain pass during a blizzard to do a sobriety test on vagrant….”

Oh, how clever I supposed myself to be.

But the truth was, during these stints I’d disappear for a period of time, prompting Mona to call the police and file a missing persons report on me. Eventually I’d be picked up in a random ally, sidewalk, freeway underpass, or park bench, stinking drunk and muttering incoherent gibberish while clutching one of my notebooks.

“You arrre leeving een a dreeeam und vaaking state hybreed.”

That’s what the Doc had told me.

SPEAKING OF Dr. Sydney Götzefalsch: he was a world-renowned psychiatrist. The reason I had originally landed in his office was because the Blonde—I mean Mona Malena—had heard about him in an ad on the radio for his clinic in the Redondo Beach area. His specialty was working with and curing cases such as mine. He deemed these cases the suffering of “temporal neurological displacement disorder,” the symptoms being “figments of reality intermeshing with fragments of imagination for a synthesis of strange perception.”

Yeah, I thought it sounded like a bunch of quackery, but Mona seemed to think it would help get me realigned with reality.

And she had pretty much come to her wit’s end at that point.

Götzefalsch had invented a revolutionary drug called “Fractalyn,” which he decided to test on me. When absorbed into the system, Fractalyn sends micro-robots deep into the brain so the patient becomes a living movie studio in which every tangent of thought is perceived and downloaded into a visual file and stored.

The patient becomes both spectator to and part of the entire mind production. These neural director-robots label all mental perceptual procedures as “fragments of reality” or “figments of imagination.”

The director-bots then organize the two components into their respective camps and send them to the “thought editor/producer bots”—who decipher which thoughts would be profitable to the organism’s sanity. The chosen ones are then released into consciousness or as dreams.

The drug acts as a type of “psychological Roto-Rooter” which cleans out the pipes in the brain from all the hallucinatory and irrational clogs. Booze, of course imperils the effects of the treatment.

Whenever I relapsed into drink, the progress I had made would regress back to the starting point and then some. Hiking is a good analogy: if I had hiked one mile, then had a slip with the booze, I’d find myself two miles back in the opposite direction of my starting point. When that did occur—which was not irregular—Dr. Götzefalsch would intensively sober me up and put me under heavy hypnotic sedation, and sometimes house me at his clinical facility.

“This veel cause great deeskomnfort und deesoreentation”—and the shock sober treatment was very uncomfortable and disorienting.

“Ze kraveeng for ze booze vill steadily deemineesh”—eventually it seemed to do so, but my brain-patterns still went to the drink out of habit.

I had to become “de-habitualized.”

And that’s where the journals came into the picture. They served as a method to keep track of my fragmented ongoing drunken stupor, as well the pill’s effects.

Though I never told her, Mona was a Godsend and the fact she had cared for and put up with my B.S. during the aftermath of self-induced blackouts spurned me on to try and be a “better man,” whatever that was.

My troubles tested and anguished her; the only conclusion to be drawn for the reason behind her patience and help could be boiled down to two words: true love.

LATELY I had been waking up earlier and earlier in the morning, so began a ritual of driving to a breakfast joint out in the inland desert of L.A, one I had frequented as a kid and teenager growing up in the suburbs called Chino Hills.

I had begun to look forward to that predawn drive. It seemed to help clear my head.

I climbed into the pickup and drove off. The clutch was beginning to show signs of slippage, and I reckoned I’d have to get it fixed in the near future.

Through the winding roads and intermittent neo-suburban desert sprawl, the truck rolled into the small, old-school breakfast joint called the “Freeborn Diner.” Their policy: feed the customer behemoth portions at an absurdly low cost.

How had it remained in business for over quarter a century? The place was always jam-packed, that’s how. The guy who owned it was a part Czechoslovakian part Cherokee chef who came across as cynical and cranky, but was in fact as gentle as a doe to those allowed into his tribe.

Aside from being a gourmet hash slinger, he had a gift of astute societal observation and was well versed in history, psychology, etiquette and cussing. The man’s humble, yet profound intellect resonated in ways beyond the operations of academia and media.

He was what they once referred to as a wise man.

And, as I said before: the man could cook—especially eggs Benedict.

“Chief, your stuff is gourmet cuisine. Still cheap as dirt,” I said the first time I had returned to his place in years, shoveling the ’68 Omelet into my mouth.

“Well thanks—thank you much. But you’re wrong. My stuff is not cheap like dirt. Look around, these days dirt ain’t cheap!”

His place, a service station, and a bar had once been the sole inhabitants for a mile either way off the once two-lane, half-paved road. Back then, people wouldn’t have taken money to own the deed of the shoddy land his little diner rested upon. I used to ride my BMX bike up and down that road to his diner without having to worry about traffic.

Today, his little restaurant resembled an archeological relic from a bygone era wedged within a mosaic of strip-malls, mega-shopping-complexes, gas station/junk food Meccas, cappuccino/latte/whatever-other-exotic-called-caffeine-fix joints, health spas, banks, movie complexes, sports bar-and-grills, theme-oriented restaurants, repetitive townhouse condos, and cheaply built houses, all adorning a six-lane road that had traffic aplenty.

“American Dreams: how can they all be the alike?” Those were the sort of pontifical questions the Chief posed to his clientele.

As an aside: Chief had acquired his English via a couple of foul-mouthed Italian immigrant mechanics, his own mother and father (both spoke very little English), and a George Carlin LP entitled Occupation Foole.

His mother was born a Lakota. She married a Czechoslovakian beer-brewer named Vaclav and the couple had baby Chief. In 1920, because of the asinine 18th Amendment prohibiting the sale of alcohol in the United States, Vaclav moved his young family back to Europe. And that is where Chief grew up. His parents believed in keeping ancestral traditions intact, so Chief had been passed Eastern European habits, as well as some Indian customs (he liked the term Indian because rather than feeling demeaned by it, he laughed at how it reflected the absurdity and stupidity of the people who assumed that nomenclature upon them).

In 1968, when the Soviet Union rolled tanks into his beloved city of Prague, Chief decided to flee Europe and return to the U.S. (which had long since ditched the 18th Amendment via the 21st Amendment). He was 50 years old at that time, and one of the first things he did when he got to California was to purchase (with all his savings) this diner and the land underneath it from a very old friend of his dad.

He had learned the craft of brewing beer from his father, who had learned from his father, and so on. Chief’s masterpiece brew was a golden bodied pilsner he called “Shiky Na Nový Světový Rád” which translates (from Czech) into “Piss on the New World Order.” The label had a tactful illustration of a farmer and Comanche chieftain urinating onto the back of an enlarged one dollar bill—both their streams targeting the eye atop the pyramid.

The beer was the best I had ever had.

I PARKED in the lot and breathed a sigh of relief; I had beaten the morning surge of people, who tended to be loud and boisterous.

An overwhelming aroma of bacon & eggs, hash browns, along with an underlying scent of pipe tobacco and brewery wafted through my nostrils.

“Morning, Chief.” I took my usual stool at the counter and grabbed the piping-hot coffee that had been promptly set before me.

“Eddie, how the fuck are you, eh?” Chief gulped down a glass of milk, set it down and donned his “Old Glory” cooking apron.

“Best as I can be. What’s new?”

“Same shit. Those bastards won’t leave me alone with their fuckin’ money offers. Now they got fuckin’ lawyers who want to find a way to get place with bullshit laws. They probably pay fuckin’ politician to make bullshit law to steal place from me. Son-of-the-bitches politician lawyers … always stirring up the shit and figuring out ways to rob us.” He cracked a couple of eggs and tossed them on the burner. “Fuckin’ money, money, money. I pay tax to some fuckin’ politician I don’t know or care for so I can give good food and good beer to good people so he can make me pay for license and license and license and tax and tax and tax so I can be legitimate and legal so I can pay more so the son-of-the-bitch can stuff my money into his obese pants pockets and go and gamble in the stock market and have good time with his fat pig son-of-the-bitch banker buddies while I barely keep my head above water. Fuck him—he and his obscene pig friends will cook in hell. Shit—they probably own hell and charge devil rent. Maybe they need more room for hell so they try to buy land from me to put on extension. Hell is too overcrowded already!” He bellowed a laugh and tossed the bacon on the burner.

The little bell above the door jingled as some guy walked in. He sported a ponytail under a faded ball cap and wore dark sunglasses, work-ridden overalls, a grubby heavy-duty flannel jacket, and duct-taped work boots.

His vestment said “trucker” but his gait and demeanor lacked what most other truckers’ expressed: cumbersome fatigue. His movements were controlled, fluid and stealthy, and he floated from the door in through the diner with an effortless cloud-like advancement.

Though the place was pretty much empty, the guy opted to take the stool right next to me.

“I be right with you!” Chief yelled from the kitchen.

The trucker grabbed the newspaper that was on the counter and opened it to the movie listings. He brandished a green Hi-Liter pen from his flannel pocket and began examining the films. He’d peruse, take pause then highlight a film, or—after taking pause—decide not to and continue his examination.

After he highlighted four films, I offered a few cents into the “small-talk machine.”

“Deciding which film to see, eh?”

“No—I’ll probably go see about five,” he stated.

“Like movies?”

“Yeah.” He paused. “Yeah I do.” He resumed silence.

“I don’t know, man. I used to like movies, especially when I was a kid. Everything seemed new and original back then. Now they’re mostly shallow and predictable pre-packaged, prefabbed consumer items. I don’t think they’re worth the money and time you gotta spend insulted by the garbage,” I ranted.

The trucker stared at me, brandishing a consistent, ever-so-slight grin on his face, as if he were simultaneously scrutinizing the inner workings of my mind and contemplating something else of a profound nature. “Well, you’re right. They are, for the most part, getting shallower. And more sophisticated.” He uncapped the highlighter and circled a specific film in the paper. “But they’re a powerful means of conditioning.”

Intriguing. He was upping the ante: we were pulling our plugs from the “small-talk” machine and plugging into the “somewhat intellectual/philosophical discourse” machine. Having frequented the Diner over the past few months, I had become quite proficient at small-talk: drawing from a pool of general human experience that required minimal training in any discipline—meaning things we all experienced and could loosely opinionate on, like: the weather, the economy, movies and sports.

Most of the time it boiled down to this: whether or not something was bullshit.

Often the simple boundaries of “small talk” widened to include more profound conversation. This required time and a certain comfort with the person you were jabbering with. Nobody would turn to a stranger pissing in the urinal next to him and ask, “So—how’s the wife and kids?” And you’d never turn to someone you barely knew in the Diner and ask, “What would your assessment be with regards to the ontology of ‘being’?” unless you preferred your eggs up your ass.

This duct-tape-booted trucker put forth the demeanor that he didn’t care where the conversation went: he sat there, examining the paper; but he was bubbling inside to share a more profound discourse with me. Such was the nature of many truckers: they spent many hours and days alone in their own rig in their own head and had plenty of time to do nothing but drive and think.

I offered: “Oh yeah. The thing is, people buy into the hype. They think the better the special effects or bigger the budget, the better the film. Or the more money the film makes, the better it is. They’re like amusement park rides—a quick thrill then forgotten as the next ride begins.”

“Yup—that’s right. They’re purposely made, packaged and sold that way. Television programs are far more potent an example of weaponized media. You think you’d be ‘missing out’ on something because everyone else watches a certain show. And you wouldn’t want to be ostracized from the herd, would you?”

I took a sip of coffee and nodded.

He continued: “You agree a show to be great because the media informs you that everyone else believes in the greatness of it. Though you may not truly believe the show to be great, you go along with them, you see enough of them, and you start to believe the show to be great. What’s really happening is the masses are getting stupefied, or hypnotized—so these shows and films only appear to be great. A kid who barely knows arithmetic would find her older brother—who can do basic algebra—to be a genius. If she eventually gets smarter and learns calculus, and her brother still know only basic algebra, she no longer sees him as math genius. The masses are like the brother—they are being stunted.”

This guy could really rant.

“People’s intelligence is devolving: we’re becoming idiots and believing basic garbage to be great. The films, the TV shows, the news, the schooling are training people to be mindless slaves, and the populace are entertained by the training. And they do have hidden agendas tucked into them. It’s called ‘predictive programming.’ You slowly condition the population to accept things they used to find degenerate, or ethically debasing, or just plain wrong. Violence is the easy example. Many more subtle examples exist.”

The guy was sliding all his coins into the machine. His nonchalant demeanor was surgical and his manner of speech mathematical. He was going over a simple lesson with a pupil.

“So why do you go see them?” I asked.

He chuckled. “I need to see what stage they’re at with their master plan. Plus, I do enjoy movie theater popcorn.”

I had a few questions at this point. Who the hell were they? What the hell did he mean by “their master plan?” And why would this hypothetical “they” wish to “dumb-down” the masses?

I was on the verge of releasing a barrage of such inquiries when a huge plate of eggs, bacon, hash browns and toast clamored down on the counter before me.

“OK Eddie, here you go. Fuckin’ enjoy the piece, eh!” Chief turned to the trucker, “What’ll it be, buddy?”

“Coffee. Black. And the egg breakfast.”

“Over-easy, soft-boiled, Benedict, hard-boiled, sunny-side up, over-medium, or scrambled?”

The truck driver paused. Through his dark tinted shades I couldn’t tell if he was studying me or the menu. After a few seconds of deliberation he answered (as though solving some trivial puzzle), “Hmm … ahhh yes—scrambled.”

I got out my journal and jotted down some notes about what had just transpired.

AFTER I had gotten my breakfast, the conversation turned into a history lesson: the man knew history. I sipped coffee, ate my breakfast and listened to Woods—that was the name he gave me—rattle off dates, places, events, people and other facts as though he were reading directly from a history book.

I sensed he was leading up to a certain point, but couldn’t fathom where. He seemed to be prepping me for some unknown, or as yet undisclosed test, as though his lesson was to be the initial spark to kindle my mind into a fire.

He went on about the development of Indo-European tribes, conquests of certain tribes upon others, the acquisition of lands, the growth of tribes, cities, cultures, states, civilizations, religions; the evolution of economy and the industrial revolution right up until World War II. In his opinion, POWER and CONTROL by a tiny master-class of an esoteric and mysterious inter-generational cabal were the main navigators of the development of human history.

“Why do these people want power and control?” I asked.

He grinned and boiled the genealogy of human history down to one word: GREED.

Then he tore out his movie list from the paper, finished his coffee, and said: “Well, I gotta go catch some films. I’ll see you.”

The little bell above the door jingled as he exited.

A quick flash of déjà vu told me I’d see that man again.

DRIVING ALONG highway 60, I opened up the glove box and the same pile of cassette tapes spilled out. I grabbed one at random and slid it into the cheap deck. Through one blown speaker and one good one, spaced-out synthesizer music accompanied by late night radio show host Art B. Well’s bassy voice came tumbling out:

“From Greenwich around back to Greenwich, from the South Pole to the North Pole—this is Art B. Well’s Take on Real Reality. Today, my guest is an ex-covert operative who worked for an entity he calls ‘the Thought Police.’ He claims this organization is an enforcement arm of a larger organization that taps all human psyches…. In other words, all thoughts, dreams, and so forth are monitored by these guys. So be careful what you think and dream, listeners! Now, my guest calls himself Agent W. Hello, Agent W.”

Agent W: “Hello, Art.”

Art: “OK. To start things off, give us a brief overview of who you are—or were—and who or what you worked for.”

Agent W: “Well, basically I was an agent employed in the Subliminal branch of the Thought Police, which is a special unit of the Really Big Brother Department, a subordinate component of the Mind Procedure and Technical Support Office, which is a branch of the Neuro Service Agency, that falls under the umbrella of the Psychological Reserve—which is (in itself) one small branch of a great, web-like tree of subliminal, neurological, biotechnical, mathematical, philosophical, economical, pseudo-spiritual, matter-of-factual, extra-dimensional, and historical entities and bureaucracies—all interlocking and tied together. Basically, they call themselves the New (and Improved) Interstellar Syndicate, also known as the N(aI)IS. The thing is so utterly multi-tiered, intricate and omnivalent that to see it as a whole—or to gestalt it—is beyond human comprehension.”

The resemblance of Agent W’s voice with that of the movie-going trucker, Woods, from the diner was more than uncanny. But I dismissed it as a mere coincidence.

The tape continued.

Art: “In what way are they—this N(aI)IS pow-wow—beyond human comprehension?”

Agent W: “Well, historically, this entity has always been around. It just happens to be so powerful and clever, humans cannot ‘connect the historical dots,’ so to speak. Here’s what is beyond human comprehension: they own most of history: past, present and future.”

Art: “Own most of history?! What exactly do you mean by that?”

Agent W: “Well, you have to unlearn what you think history is—that is, as a series of random cause-and-effect driven events building up to present day. History is really a large, inter-dimensional map, or book of various maps. Like a ‘Thomas Guide’ road Atlas. Instead of mapping out streets in cities, freeways in states, and interstates in countries, the N(aI)IS map out history and focus on the movements and thoughts of each individual’s life, then it expands to families, tribes, cities, cultures, countries, civilizations, planetary systems, galaxies and universes. It’s nonlinear—‘time’ is the thread through which history is organized in three-dimensional space.”

Art: “Well, that certainly is powerful. So you are saying they know the past, present and future of everything and everyone within the universe?”

Agent W: “Universes; there exist more than one … but no, they do not. They have obtained most of the Milky Way’s, as well as a small section of the Andromeda Galaxy’s.”

Art: “Astonishing. This entity has total awareness of every instance of my very own past, present and future?”

Agent W: “You bet they do.”

Art: “And Bruce the producer here?”

Agent W: “Yup.”

Art: “…and the entire human population here on Earth?”

Agent W: “Pretty much.”

Art: “Whew…. Wow…. So what are they trying to accomplish by harvesting this information?”

Agent W: “Excellent question. They want to own each individual’s life ‘map,’ or ‘script.’ They do this by attempting to make revisions on certain parts of these maps or scripts—on all levels, if you will. For example, they will have to go through every individual’s ‘neural roads’ and DNA blueprints in order to revise their personal history. They have to do this meticulously for every individual’s existence throughout history.”

Art: “Now, wouldn’t this alter history whole-heartily?”

Agent W: “Astute observation. Obviously it could—and probably has already. But these maniacs—and they are maniacs—are so arrogant they think they are going to just revise memories and make subtle adjustments so they can control all of space and time, both of which are hot commodities. They are insane and meticulous … they have acquired (through a variety of dubious means) the best MTs—or ‘Mind Technicians’ fussing with individual neural circuits, adjusting and tweaking the psyches of people, unbeknownst to the people they are working on. Sometimes they must go through a few drafts of someone’s life in order to make certain that person’s life still fits within the framework of the ‘bigger picture.’ Some people—for reasons they cannot ascertain—have the capacity for more liberated thoughts and hyper-awareness, so they must be constantly revised via ‘Confusion and Distraction’ protocols, whereby they might have a few versions of their lives superimposed on top of the other and seem to experience a schizology. Or they continuously place and replace the person’s time perception, so the person feels a sense of déjà vu and time-based schizophrenia. All this to get at the core of the individual’s ‘programming,’ to attempt to alter the code. The more resistant ones are the intriguing ‘specimens’ (as they like to call them), for they seem to cause the most problems for them, and they can’t figure out ‘what makes them tick.’ Anyway—that’s a side topic. Most people go through two or three similar ‘existences,’ or live out pieces of their existences numerous occasions, unaware that most or some of their existence has already been lived before, but with minor alterations—and unaware that they are completely owned.”

Art: “So technically, this very interview could have already happened, and may happen again?”

Agent W: “No, it hasn’t happened before. Prior to going AWOL from the agency, I ascertained a hard copy of the original draft of this piece of history (as well as some others, which I have given to other ‘loose cannons’, but again, a side note), so I made it onto the show via a kind of ‘loophole.’ It won’t happen again, since after this is over they’ll go through and alter your own history, as well as those who happen to be listening. It is a pain in the ass for them—but in the end, this interview will have most likely never happened, or will just seem like some goofy joke that virtually no one will take seriously.”

Art: “Well then—what is the purpose of this interview?”

Agent W: “You ask the good questions, Art—that’s one purpose. Another one is that this is entertainment, and don’t get me wrong, I love entertainment. Most importantly, there are those who are listening, possibly even taping the show, who may listen to the tape again even though their minds have been washed from the memory of this event, and it may help them. Remember, the N(aI)IS is limited in scope. They may be able to reprogram and alter or clean up a vast amount of things, but it would be impossible for them to track and destroy every possible record of information, particularly hard analog copies such as printed and taped copies. As another aside, that’s why they moved us away from stone engravings a while back and now they’re attempting to veer away from tape and even CD and print and make everything digital, so it’ll be easier to manage, revise, erase and control … but we have plans to use their own plans against them—to forestall their endeavors … and to help the Cause.”

Art: “That’s too bad I’m going to forget this, I find it compelling. You mentioned a cause.”

Agent W: “Yes—the cause for free thought and will.”

I ejected the tape and locked the brakes on the truck to avoid rear-ending the car in front of me. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“Free thought and will!” My mind raced.

A deluge of thoughts poured from my combusted psyche. Was it coincidental that I just happened to play this tape right after meeting Woods at the diner? I had the gut feeling that Agent W was on the level. Just like Woods. They spoke the same truth and had the same cadence and vernacular. Agent W was the trucker, Woods. Had to be.

And somehow I fit into this grand scheme.

I felt a clicking into place, like when you know a larger work is at play, and you almost know what it is but you could be way off—like seeing a UFO in the night sky or is it just a satellite or a plane?

I sensed a frenzied awareness of “everything” coming together and simultaneously slipping away. My identity. My sanity. Where did I get that cassette tape? I examined the handwriting on the label. It wasn’t my handwriting. As a matter of fact, whoever had written on the label had used a green highlighter. Wasn’t Woods using a green highlighter at the diner?

I needed a drink.

TRAFFIC CRAWLED back into the city because a Corvette had capsized and ended up on the other side of the freeway, tying up both sides. It was late afternoon when I finally entered my apartment and the place smelled like chemicals. Mona had died her hair red, which I thought was odd, and I’d have to change her nickname, but it looked nice.

She had set up an easel in the corner of the dining room, where she was brushing paint onto a canvas. She had taken up painting and was getting quite good at it.

“Hey, you like it?” she asked from behind the canvass. “The hair, I mean.”

“You bet,” I said.

“And the painting? I don’t really know what it means yet, but I saw it in a dream last night.”

On the canvas was what looked to be a giant satellite dish on top of a mountain pointing up at a daytime full moon. Wild.

I walked into my bedroom, grabbed my pile of worn-out notebooks, walked to the kitchen, found a “Universal Studios” shot glass tucked up behind some other pointless dish ware, then sat down at the table.

I lifted my new purchase as gently as a newborn babe out from its brown paper sack and placed the 1.5 liter bottle of Smirnoff vodka on the table; the warning label on the back caught my eye.

“Where’s the warning label on the bottle of life we get at birth?”

I wondered if that thought warranted me writing it down.

Twisting off the cap, I poured a shot and put it back.

I decided against jotting down the thought.

It had been two-and-a-half months since I had any booze, so the shot felt like a hatchet chopping up my throat. My hack thwarted Mona, the Blonde—now the Red—out from her artistic concentration.

I anticipated an onslaught of cussing and scolding on her part.

Instead, she placed her brush down, got up and approached me. She sat down across from me at the table.

Neither of us spoke.

I poured another shot and took it down; this time I didn’t wince.

“What happened?” she asked.

“My life. Maybe a few times. Maybe a few times too many. Maybe free thought and will….”

I had expected her to say, “What the hell’s wrong with you?” Instead, she nodded. “I figured this would happen. Perhaps you should give Götzefalsch a call.”

Götzefalsch—the quack that she found for me. How convenient.

“Yeah, that might be a terrific idea … then perhaps you should give the Thought Police a little jingle—let ‘em know you got a drunk on your hands spilling out illegal thoughts … they might need to lock it down.”

She was taken aback, or at least gave the impression of being so.

“The Thought Police? Eddie….”

I cut her off with a guffaw-like chuckle. At this particular point, my life had boiled down to a B-grade movie, and I was merely playing the role. But I was on to her. Maybe I had always known the truth. My problem, or recurring problem was that I didn’t know if I knew.

Staring at the redheaded beauty with her fantastically false pretense of sympathy creasing across her big blue eyes, I knew that I knew something: she couldn’t be trusted.

“Those pills must be working. Eddie, don’t drink—you’ll relapse. I don’t want to lose you again!”

“It ain’t those pills—I don’t know what those things are doing … probably re-mapping my existence. Maybe they are the source … maybe the only loophole for me is booze. Shit, I don’t know.”

“Eddie, we’ve been through this before.”

I flipped through one of my notebooks. Lots of handwritten half-baked ideas and nonsense. “We probably have been through this before, and we may go through it again…. M.T.—M.T….” A business card fell from one of the notebooks. “Mind Technician! That’s it! Götzefalsch’s working for those son-of-a-bitches! He’s one of them! Maybe you’re one of them!”

“Settle down, Eddie, settle down.” She assumed a no-nonsense, professional posture, and stroked my cheek. “He’s working for us.”

“You and me? That’s comical.” I poured a shot and lifted the glass. “I should jot that down.”

“The Free Thought-and-Will Chapter,” she said, moving the bottle of vodka away.

I placed my full shot glass back down.

“WHAT THE hell are you trying to do to me? I don’t want any more of the pills. I’m done!” I yelled as Götzefalsch paced behind his desk.

After Mona mentioned the Free Thought-and-Will Chapter, I let her convince me to go see the Doc, but now I was having a rush of doubt.

The Doc shushed me, looked around and whispered, “Eddie, I am geeving you fake peels—vons vich act seemular to theirs, but vill actually free your mind up, eenstead of manipulate it.” He winked.

Mona stood next to the doctor and leaned closer to me. “We know that the Head Covert Manipulator of the Syndicate in this area is a man called Froward Moroni. He acts as an eccentric vagabond who goes around and collects other ‘disenfranchised’ people and enlists them into a roving artistic troupe. Seems harmless on the surface, but covertly the ‘artists’ act as unknowing conduits for the spread of mass-mind-washing. He slips everyone the drugs and we don’t know how, but he implements some sort of transistor-neural frequency via a device—perhaps installed in his own brain—which has laser-like precision and can completely act on a personality individually. The person then carries this frequency and spreads it broadband, all on a neuro-telepathical and hyper-subliminal series of bandwidths that piggyback along all electronic transmissions and frequencies. Very technical and dastardly. These poor bastards don’t realize they are agents for one part of the plan for Subliminal Imperialism.”

Was she serious? Or had she just memorized that spiel like a good actress?

Telepathic ventriloquist. That thought scurried from the recesses of my mind to my awareness. Where had I encountered that?

Mona continued. “You were to act as a spy, gathering intelligence on the man. We apologize, because in order to infiltrate, your mind had to be altered so Moroni couldn’t scan you for your true objectives. He had to be convinced that you were a burned-out writer on the skids. Therefore, you had to be convinced as well, or at least confused about your place in life. That’s why you’re presently confused as to your identity; most of your identity is either cloaked or forged from the pills and neural programming. We’re trying to retrieve your actual identity, but it’s been tough going.”

It started to come into focus, the way a movie projector does before the opening previews. Slowly, the pieces began to line up in a semblance of logical order.

I wasn’t insane.

I was being made insane.

For a higher purpose.

“Makes sense. So when I drink, some of my true thoughts could spill out, prompting an A.P.B. to be put out for me?”

With his thick Austrian, or German, or possibly Swiss accent, the Doc spoke: “Preecisely. Vee also need to keep track of you to unclog dee fake identitee und get you back to your true self. But vee must bee very careful, or else they veel find you out, und us too!”

Mona reached down and squeezed my hand. “Moroni did a thorough job on you. We think he’s attempting to use you as his own spy to gather intel on us. Not knowing we were already working with Götzefalsch, he sent you here to have you re-integrated as an agent, after his big speech at Griffith Park, the one where he ‘declared war’ on the N(aI)IS. And if you don’t pan out for him, you’ll be written off as a burned-out writer who drifts through life in a drunken, confused and brainwashed stupor. They want everyone pretty much that way anyhow … to keep people enslaved. Either way, he’s got nothing to lose.”

I thought (what I hoped to only myself) that everything was too perfectly cliché. If this were a novel, I would’ve wanted to donkey-punch the writer. The dialogue was schlocky, the storyline all over the damn place, and the plot dangled like pieces of loose thread as the writer desperately tried to make connections as he went along. Somehow I had ended up his victim, with him testing to see how much of his disheveled madness I could—or would—endure.

“You people are full of shit. This is some kind of fucked-up psychological test in the form of a game to see whether I can distinguish fact from fiction. If I buy into this crap, you guys will string me along and allow me to go through this ‘test’ confused, mentally disjointed and unfocused. If I don’t buy into it, you will let me know I am ‘progressing very well’ and I am re-integrating into society as planned. Either way, I am brainwashed. And for God knows what purpose. Do you two get off on fucking with people’s heads?”

They exchanged glances and the Doc shrugged.

Mona straightened her jacket and stepped back. “We’re looking out for your best interest, Eddie. We’re here to help you regardless of what you choose to believe. At least give us that: we’re allowing you to choose. So what will it be? What do you want to do?”

She had me there.

The time and effort she had spent with me—regardless of who she was—testified on behalf of some kind of compassion for me, or at least a commitment to her job of acting compassionate, which was also admirable.

At this particular moment I wanted to get the hell away and try to collect and organize any cogent thought that happened to be lying about my disheveled psyche. I wanted—no, I needed to speak with someone who I could identify with … then (at the very least) I’d know if I was alone in my predicament or if others were also in the same screwy boat. If there were others in the same screwy boat we could, perhaps, pool together our own experiences and solve the existential query of what the fuck was going on here?

Telepathic Ventriloquist. The thought flashed into my mind again.

Then the remembrance of one man perhaps I could trust.

“I want to go see Fred Fillono, the filmmaker,” I said.

AFTER A FEW weeks of research, I happened upon Fillono’s whereabouts while perusing the latest issue of the Independent Thinker’s Film Mag. The magazine contained a little expose on the man: Fillono had founded the “Please Yourself for the Sake of Others Film Institute,” which was situated high up in a remote part of the Colorado Rockies.

Up there in the mountains he had inherited a semi-defunct small ski resort near a quaint town, whereupon he had socially engineered an academy and community that focused on filmmaking, sculpting, performance art, poetry, music, dancing, theatre, photography, painting along with farming, carpentry, electronics, plumbing, mathematics, engineering and chess. Rather than paying a tuition to attend the academy, the students were to learn a trade in tandem with their studies and work their trade within the community in exchange for their schooling. No money whatsoever existed in the place: all exchanges for goods and services and shelter and whatnot were conducted with a computer-calculated “barter system.”

I jotted down the address, grabbed the Road Atlas of the Western United States, packed up some gear, gave Mona a goodbye hug and kiss, got into my pick-up truck and started on my way toward Fillono’s utopia.

It was a trip I had to take alone.

Mona understood, or at least pretended to.

She was a helluva gal. Or was playing the part too damned well.

ART: “SO—what precisely is this Free Thought and Will Chapter?”

Agent W: “It’s not a question of what it is, rather who is part of it. It isn’t a large, centralized organization in the conventional sense. There is no real chain of command structure, no hierarchical membership. It’s rather a series of chapters in different areas who are commissioned by the Originator of All Realities to achieve the same goal. Many may be part of it who don’t know they are, while others are part of a counterfeit version in the guise of the real deal.”

Art: “So what’s the goal of this cacophonous and rather unconventional organization?”

Agent W: “To stave off tyrannical forces for the liberty of all individuals … the same intent as the Originator of All Realities’ intent was, is and always will be: for all sentient beings having a freedom to choose.”

Art: “Choose? What do you mean by that?”

Agent W: “Having a freedom to make a choice is the very essence of freedom itself. Let me begin by telling you what choice is not. Television news programming offers a good example. OnTV—including cable—there are a number of various news channels. Therefore, on the surface it seems as though the average viewer has quite a number of options to digest various views on the information being presented. With these ‘alternating’ views, the viewer feels they’re able to gain a clearer picture with the information, hence get a clearer perspective on the world at large. Allegedly, the viewer has choices on how to decipher the given information, process it, and think about it. But the viewer doesn’t really have any choices, you see. The game is rigged—the information gates are filtered, the environment is controlled. These numerous channels are really owned by a cartel of only a few mega-powerful corporate entities who dictate what information the networks receive, how they release it and even comment on its implications. So the viewer receives information in a manner on how it is given to them, and his attitudes are shaped in a manner, which serves the corporation’s best interest. If I own a giant chemical plant, I will make sure the virtues of my product are extolled and those of the alternatives are either not heard or else demonized. There is no choice—only a brainwashing. Another classic example: play two sides off each other. This is why there are wars: someone always makes money off wars, and that someone doesn’t care who wins…. What people don’t realize is that, like Don King, they tend to own both boxers.”

Art: “Ahh, so people believe they have choices, but these choices are really just—uh—different manifestations of one given agenda or program.”

Agent W: “Yup ‘program’ is a good word…. We are programmed. History, religion, philosophy, economics, cola, various means of existence, they all adhere to the same pattern. What’s really happening is that people have been and are being indoctrinated like a herd into one narrow view, all the while going through life believing they are free to roam around the prairie and be free and make willing choices….”

Art: “Well, I personally believe myself to have freedom. I mean, I should pay taxes, work, stop at red lights, purchase food—but I choose to do those things, otherwise chaos would ensue. I have enough intelligence to know what to believe and what not to believe. I still believe I live in a country which allows us liberties and freedoms—within the realm of reason.”

Agent W: “Of course; relatively speaking, we have more ‘room to roam’ than do certain people in other parts of the world. But the process of indoctrination relies upon that. If you are in a cage larger and cleaner than a person next to you, your captors may say to you ‘look at that! You’re free to stretch out and walk around. Your neighbor is in a cage. You’re free.’ The actuality is that both are in cages—one simply happens to be less constricting. Over time, this is how the process works. The masses are slowly being boiled. Rather than an invasion with tanks and guns and missiles, we are being invaded slowly, subtly; subliminally and electronically. The military generals now come in the form of investment banking magnates and global cartels and wear three-pieced suits. Guns have been replaced with TVs, computers and other gizmos, firing their ammo in the form of bits directly into the brains of the populace. Art, the play has gone covert—subliminally so. If you were mind-washed, would you know it?”

Art: “Er—well—obviously not.”

Agent W: “You’re correct. You see, to a certain extent we are free like a prisoner is free to roam about his cell, eat, piss, shit his pants if he wants to…. But in reality, the prisoner is only free within his confines. Hence, on a cosmic scale—he is not free at all. Real choice is the ability to have complete and untainted Truth datum offered you, and how you decide to conduct your life given this info.”

Art: “Truth … well, that is a Titanic concept, with many varying views…. Is there but one all-encompassing absolute Truth?”

Agent W: “Oh, sure there is. Truth is not a convoluted, confusing concept as it is made out to be. It is, in fact very simple. Truth is—”

At this point Woods’, or Agent W’s voice began to slow down and contort like a machine powering down. I ejected the cassette, and a long stream of the brown magnetic tape poured forth in a spaghetti heap. The cassette player had eaten the tape. I tossed the plastic casing out the window, leaving behind yards of useless tape that streamed for at least twenty yards behind the vehicle. I grabbed my machete from under the seat and drove it into the mouth of the deck. Plastic and metal snapped and cracked as I twisted and darted the weapon into the machine, cursing the whole time.

I DROVE down a deserted freeway for a while with the radio shut off, sitting with the unbearable clamor in my head. I am Eddie Bikaver, hack reporter. I’m on assignment assembling the fragmented scraps of my life. I’ve been swindled. Moroni fucked me over. No one can be trusted. Who am I again?

I turned the dial on the half-busted console, hoping to come across a station. After the furious vengeance I had wrought upon the deck, I was somewhat shocked the radio still worked. Though I wasn’t in the mood for blocks of incessant commercials trying to get me to buy that damned car, eat that damned fast food, or use that damned credit card, I’d graciously take a string of ads followed by some fluffy pop tune from 1978, rather than listen to one more thought.

After the fifth commercial yelling about some morning radio zoo programming, I clicked the radio off.

Instead I drove and concentrated to the drone of the motor. I liked that; my mind finally felt at ease. I hadn’t had any sense of purpose or direction for quite some time. Winding my way to Fillono’s academy allowed me to have a sense of progression: I knew where I was going, what I was doing and how I was doing it—and on my own accord. For the time being, my mind was focused … that is, until….

I am Eddie Bikaver, hack reporter. I’m on assignment assembling the fragmented scraps of my life. I’ve been swindled. Moroni fucked me over. No one can be trusted. Who am I again…? Damn this mind.….

On the western slope of Colorado, the main arteries of the freeway turned into the narrower state highways and after an hour or so the mesas and foothills yielded to the vast and majestic mountains. I pulled over to study the map. I had two options: stay on this state highway and circumvent this range of mountains, or take the pass, which would be more scenic and possibly shave a few hours off my drive, as long as the weather permitted. The sky was blue with some patches of cotton-ball clouds. I rolled off the highway and onto the two-lane road straight for the mountains.

A half-hour on the pass, a fog had set in, which made driving the switchback ridden and guardrail-less road all the more treacherous. I stayed relaxed, taking it easy, though I had to keep wiping sweat off my palms. Visibility was minimal, and the edge of an abyss loomed just yards away from the side of the road—one simple yank of the wheel to the left and I would’ve tumbled down the side of the mountain….

A PERSISTENT drizzle decided to accompany the fog as the paved two-lane road became a one-lane dirt road, which eventually evolved into a mud trail. My sweat-ridden palms were slick on the wheel and I kept the vehicle in first gear.

Maybe the short cut wasn’t such a bright idea.

The rear wheels of the truck fishtailed every so often as the grade became steeper, the switchbacks sharper, the fog heavier and the precipitation more copious. I had to keep going, for if the truck stopped there was a good chance of getting stuck. A blind U-turn on this narrow mountainside Jeep-trail was out of the question. I tried by instinct and feel to hug the inside of the road—the mountainside—and prayed that I didn’t hit a random, giant fallen boulder, and that a random, giant falling boulder would not hit me.

As soon as the rain seemed as though it would subside, it beat down with greater vengeance and fury. At this point the windshield wipers were a mere formality—the water cascaded down like a gushing waterfall. I poked my head out the window, but gusts of wind and rain pelted my face, slamming into my eyes and causing me to jerk the truck toward the edge. My best chance for survival had boiled down to me winging it. The truck bogged down in the mud, fishtailed more and seemed on the verge of going over the edge as each sodden second progressed.

I thought I was at the top of the pass but couldn’t tell whether the sign read “scenic overlook” or “beware steep grade and curves ahead.” Now the pick-up lurched and slid downward and the engine worked on keeping the thing slowed down. I punched the breaks to the floor. My heavy breathing filled the cabin. I could see nothing, and lost all control of the truck. I was at the mercy of this mountain, and I guessed this mountain had never contemplated a concept such as “mercy” in its long existence….

THE TRUCK slid into what would be its (and my) doom. A slideshow display of my life manifested before me in no particular chronological order: Age five: waking up on the playground after having fallen off swing, other kids surrounding me…. Age 14: kissing first girlfriend…. Age 17: falling off side of building trying to climb drunk…. Age 7: asking my dad if we could visit the remote place depicted on the Close Encounters of the Third Kind film poster…. Age 10: scoring the championship goal…. Age 15: learning to fly a plane…. Age 16: talking to a NASA guy about how to go about becoming an astronaut…. Age 25: being recruited by someone I can’t remember the name or face of for something covert and having permanent amnesia thereafter…. Age 3: inside a bubble because of an acute asthma attack.

The images flashed in rapid-fire and random succession, millisecond bits of consolidated memory datum bursting forth, yet a dreamlike quality stretched each scenario to seemingly last seconds,minutes or even hours. I clenched my eyes shut and bellowed forth a primal yell, fearing these were my final moments on terra firma before smashing into the terminal unknown….

The crash never occurred. What seemed to happen was more a wipeout—like spinning 720 degrees on sheer ice and coming to a sudden halt. It would’ve been a casual way to go: spinning-out horizontally into death.

But I realized I was, in fact, not dead, for I heard that relentless rain plinking on the truck. Opening my eyes, my hands were intact and shaking, still wet with sweat. I turned the rearview down to check my face in the mirror; blood poured from a gash on my forehead.

The engine was tacked out—my foot had passed from the brake to the accelerator. In a state of concussed delirium and shock, I was aroused into a semi-state of awareness by a tapping on the window. I rolled it down, and a tight-jawed man wearing a green plastic “Las Vegas” visor, scuba goggles, and an army-green plastic poncho leered in upon me. Between his teeth he clenched a cigarette holder with a soggy cigarette.

“Goddammit man—get your foot off the pedal and shut your rig off—you’re gonna blow the goddamn engine to Richard Nixon’s grave!”

I let off the gas and killed the ignition.

“Man, you’re either a jackass or an adrenaline junky, or both.” He eyed me then the truck. In a sudden spasm, he lurched his head into the cab, his goggles no more than 3 inches from my face, his damp cigarette pressing against my cheek. “Yeah, you’ve seen the edge, there’s no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over,” he mumbled.

“I don’t think I went over,” I said.

He eyed my forehead then commanded, “That’s it! Out of the truck! You need immediate medical attention! And you are in luck, man—because I am a certified EM fucking T.”

Somehow this terse, eccentric fellow didn’t strike me as an EMT. Screw it, I thought. At least I’m not mangled at the bottom of a ravine. I opened the door and stumbled out.

“For god sakes man—roll up the window or your seats will get sopped!”

“Eh, yeah.” I rolled up the window and looked around to see where I had landed.

The truck had slid down a muddy side road that happened to be the driveway to what was this man’s residence. On either side of the entrance stood two tall totem poles, with a falcon carved on top of each one. The drive spilled into a flat area where a Jeep was parked, and various items (such as television sets, toaster-ovens, mannequins, LP album covers of disco bands from the 70s, a typewriter and a rubber mask of George Herbert Walker Bush) were strewn about; most of them bullet-ridden through and through. A wire fence encircled the perimeter of his cabin.

He stopped at the gate and leered with one eye and bit on the plastic cigarette holder. “Are you armed?”

“Uhh—no, no I’m not.”

He reflected then stated, “Well, we’ll take care of that later. A man’s gotta be armed in this area—this is bear, wild boar, and bat country!”

There was a sign nailed to the gate:

The inside of his cabin was cozy in a Dadaistic, disheveled way. Scattered about the dining room table were piles of paper that camouflaged a desktop computer and printer. A cursory examination of the living room yielded thus: three mannequins wearing Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton masks, seated in various states of repose around a coffee table; Old Glory flags draped as curtains, miscellaneous bric-a-brac piled on shelves worthy of a tourist shop off Hollywood Blvd. There were also a bunch of old photographs of World War II taped up everywhere, a “Federal Map of the United States” pinned to the wall, an 18th Century musket hanging above the fireplace, and tying the room together on the far wall was framed Monet’s “Sunset in Venice.”

He mumbled off to the kitchen, where the clatter of kitchenware clanging and falling, cupboard doors slamming and the occasional muttered cussing emanated. Through the saloon-styled doors to the kitchen, he spilled forth, brandishing a liter of Wild Turkey whiskey, some gauze bandages and an infantry knife. The cigarette holder clenched in his teeth held a fresh cig. Gone was the poncho. He sported a floral Hawaiian shirt underneath a sleeveless mountain vest. He still had on the visor and goggles. Like his front yard and living room, it was an eclectic look.

He took the knife, stabbed it into the table. “Sit down,” he grunted.

He grabbed two empty glasses that had been on the table and poured each to the rim, and set his cigarette into an ashtray. “First the Captain—to steady his nerves.” In one gulp he put back the entire glass of whiskey. He grabbed the knife, cut out a giant wad of gauze and saturated it with the booze.

“Ready, set—” In a flash the gauze stung my forehead. He pulled it away and scrutinized his work, then jammed the glass into my hand and stated, “As your Captain I command you to take four of these per hour. Starting now!”

I vaguely remembered promising Mona I’d lay off the booze, but the memory was hazy enough to ignore. I took his advice and put it back. He cut off another strip of the gauze and wrapped it around the top of my head. Pondering the wrapping, he blurted, “Shit—we need the healing stuff of Chief Rain-In-the-Face.” He poured another glass for us both, and roved across the room to a closet, where he rummaged through a bunch of miscellaneous stuff. “Alas!” he sauntered back and held up a feather. He tucked it into the wrapping on my head, put back his drink and declared, “Captain Stockton T. Jager does it again!”

Five shots later I was “feeling no pain.”

In fact, I wasn’t feeling much of anything.

My host had been scribbling on random sheets of paper and feeding them into his fax machine, rambling things like “take that you pinko bastard!”

He glanced over at me, examined the almost emptied bottle and declared, “Man—you gotta be black-ops. Anyone that dares fuck with you had better fly one way, because they are not coming back!”

He brandished a revolver pistol from his desk drawer, opened the chamber, spun it and clicked it shut. His fax machine began spitting out a message, prompting my host—the good Captain Jager—to yell out “evasive maneuver!” whereupon he tumbled over, took aim and unloaded three rounds into the machine, annihilating it. He grabbed the sheet of paper, scrutinized it and set it ablaze using a Zippo lighter, then lit his cigarette via the flaming document prior to stomping it out. He surveyed the damage like a military field commander after a battle.

“Damned collateral damage,” he grunted, sitting down across from me and pouring another round. “What’s the score—what’s your story?”

“Uhhh, I was headed toward an old friend’s and I thought I’d take a short cut—and now here I am.”

“Here indeed.” He stubbed the burned down cigarette into the already full ashtray and poked a fresh cigarette into his holder, lighting it. “That’s the ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘where.’ I need the ‘why’ and particularly the ‘who’ dammit!”

What the hell was this maniac getting at? This was a question I wasn’t sure I could fully answer.

“Who? I am Eddie Bikaver, a shitty writer from Los Angeles who seems to be suffering from a schizotemporalistic condition.” I paused. “And possibly some varying degrees of psychosis, on top of alcoholism and probably a few other things they have either not figured out or invented yet.”

He nodded, pushing his goggles up to his wrinkled forehead.

“At one point I was a bum, and I rolled with this character named Fillono, who moved out this way and founded some sort of resort art community. The reason why—”

“Whynot!” he interrupted.

“Eh—yeah—I suppose so. Why not. Nothing better to do.”

“No you rube! ‘Whynot’ is the name of the goddamned resort town Fred Fillono runs. Yeah, it’s a hoot. It’s what you’d get if you tossed 1984 and Aspen, Colorado into a blender. I was one shitsucking vote from becoming sheriff of that place. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to vote. Mescaline is a helluva drug!”

The rain began to blink on the cabin roof. My buzz was in full effect.

THE BOOZE had taken hold, Jager was attempting to light a fire in his fireplace while I eased back, taking in the mountain evening air and listening to the millions of pellets of water frolicking, after their long skydive from the mothership storm cloud, off the roof of the Captain’s cabin. I pondered the point of view of one of those raindrops—from the sky, forming into a droplet and then go-time, the brief exhilaration upon acceleration due to gravity, looking about and seeing thousands of your fellow raindrops above, below and about you sharing the experience of a short, terminal-velocity filled existence, the earth approaching ever-so-rapidly. One last quick view of the roof, or ground, or a tree top and then “SPLAT”—back to the oneness of water.

“Rat bastard!” the Captain’s yelling shook me out of my bullshit Buddhistic meditation. He had mounted what looked to be a fumigation tank on his back, attached to the tank was some sort of spray nozzle. Upon closer view, it was no fumigation system, for on the tank, in bold black letters were written “U.S. ARMY.”

“TAKE THIS!” he shouted, and a stream of gasoline and fire spewed forth from the end of the barrel, and a whirling fireball exploded in the fireplace, shooting flames out and about the room. “SHIT!” He backed away, muttered something about Dante, then picked up a fire extinguisher he had under the table and proceeded to quell the random small fires in the room and around the fireplace—careful not to disturb the now roaring flames within the fireplace. I deduced this was standard operating procedure for this man: he was a virtuoso. The fire in the fireplace gave the place a cozy feel.

He took off the garb and tossed it into the closet. “Lieutenant Bikaver!” A fresh glass of booze slapped against my hand. “Why the hell did you take this assignment? Duty? Honor? Excitement? Free booze? Shit man, this one was so jacked I wouldn’t have taken it in my prime—and I’ve taken some weird ones!”

Jager’s face superimposed itself then separated into two. I was seeing double. I closed my right eye and saw he had taken off the scuba goggles and now studied me through tinted eyeglasses.

“Eh?” I asked.

“They got you sideways and turned around and deep. You’ve been compromised. The Honcho has notified me that you need a temporary reset, and I got just the thing!” He handed me a couple of red capsules.

“What honcho? What the hell is this?” I examined the red pill with one eye.

“Not what, man—why. Take one! Save the other for another time. You’ll need it.”

More booze, more drugs: I had gotten this far, however far this was. Once again my unbothered (or reckless) mindset had already made the decision. Screw it. I tossed the cap into my mouth and swallowed with a shot of Wild Turkey. I put the other one into my pocket.

“That, my friend, is a time capsule. You will see the why shortly.”

JAGER TOOK away the rest of the booze and withdrew into the kitchen. My vision blurred around the room, at times gaining focus then failing. Mild butterflies fluttered about my ribcage; shadows and the orange light from the fireplace reverberated into a golden glowing hue. The table, the walls, all objects in my field of vision took forth this luminance, and the actual atmosphere of the room began to shimmer.

The intoxication of the booze melted away and was replaced by an ever-growing sensation of in-spiritedness. Though I was seated, I felt an uncanny sense of buoyancy and lightness, as though I were in a boat or possibly hot-air balloon. My vision refocused to a hyper-clarity; I could see into the essential matter of things and possibly through them.

Hallucinogens.

Did I write that, or think it, or say it? It didn’t matter at this point—I was in deep.

L.S.D. or maybe mescaline?

Captain Jager reemerged from the kitchen with a briar pipe in his mouth.

“Powerful stuff?” I asked him, who was now just a bleary fading spot in my periphery.

My assumption was confirmed, for in the next immediate instant, I perceived myself to be in three locations simultaneously in space and was somehow outside time….

“I’m still in the living room, but I’m also in Doktor Götzefalsch’s office.”

“Yes, Meester Beekaver? You said you are ver?” Dr. Sydney Götzefalsch is seated before me, scribbling into his pad.

“I’m here and there?”

“And?”

“I’m also somehow back in the Lay-Z-Boy lounge chair in the mysterious location—present tense—being asked questions by Hal, the nameless, faceless Interrogator…. Can he read my mind right now? Or does he require me to speak?”

“Pipe down, Shitbird, you don’t wanna give away everything. Someone’s gonna ask you what pill you took, probably that duplicitous Doc. Tell him a mescaline derivative.” Captain Jager lights the briar pipe and barks at me. “I know I’m lighting a pipe, you jackass! Stop narrating about me and pay attention,” he yells from his spot across the living room.

“Who are you veet, Meester Beekaver? Kant you remember hees name?”

Jager shouts, “Tell him Ronald Reagan. He’ll probably get a kick in the pants from that one.”

“The Gipper.” I answer.

“Who?” Götzefalsch asks.

“Ronald Reagan,” I say.

The Doc attempts to repress the shock registered on his face.

The Interrogator now chimes in. “You seem to be in a confused state, Mr. Bikaver. Why have you stopped giving me past information? Are you having problems with your recall?”

“Rat Bastard! He’s probably a dirty low-down AI,” mutters Jager.

“I know I muttered that!” says Jager.

“Get the hell out of this loop—don’t worry about what the hell I say right now!” yells Jager. “Or else they’ll track onto me too.”

“Aha—I’m in a loop, and….”

“A loop, eh? Vaht sort of peel deed Meester Raygun geeve too you?” The Doc seems to have regained composure from the previous blow.

“I believe it was mescaline,” I answer.

The Doc is tsk-tsking and shaking his head. “Zat may be very contradeectory to ze other medikation you are on. I am not shure dat vas ein gut idea.”

“Mr. Bikaver—are you having problems with your recall?” the Interrogator repeats.

Neither the Interrogator nor Dr. Götzefalsch are aware of one another, only me, as though I were talking to each of them on two separate telephones.

“Yes—I believe the drugs Doctor Götzefalsch gave me did something—at times I would forget where I was and what I was doing—like a walking blackout.”

“You were on your way to Fillono’s. You took a shortcut. Rain began to fall—then heavily. You almost ran your car off the road, having a ‘near death’ experience, wherein a series of memories flashed before you. Then what happened?” The Interrogator probes for more information.

“Didn’t we already go over this?” I ask.

Wait a second. The Interrogator doesn’t know this part. Did I stop the narrative after the crash? Impossible—otherwise, how would I be where I am at now—to this very sentence in the story? I seem to have a certain power to withhold information. Hal, the Interrogator, must not have an up-to-date version of my activities. In that sense, I am free. But for how long?

“Please explain,” the Interrogator says.

“I can’t remember,” I say, just to say something.

“Zat vas vat I vas afraid vould happen. Ve might try ein deeferent approach.” The Doc exits the office.

I get up and go to the window. Blackness outside. Not night, just blackness. Where the hell am I? I examine my surroundings.

Something is strange—as though this is not real.

Am I on a set? I go to the door and open it. Outside there’s an empty airplane hangar—dark except for the luminance issuing forth from the Doc’s office, which I can now see is in fact an artificial set, built of plywood flats. From afar I hear the reverberation of footsteps, what I perceive to be emanating from more than one pair of shoes. Maybe three or four. Should I go back inside and play dumb or get the hell out of here? Wherever here is.

“Your call,” Captain Jager—I mean Ronald Reagan—whispers. “If you stay, who knows? If you bolt, they’ll track you down and they’ll probably make you go through all this again—ad infinitum.”

“What the hell are they doing?”

“Shit, man—mind surveillance. Exterminating free will. Rendering you helpless. And attempting to use you to track back to us. You’re in the lion’s den, bubba—and don’t forget that!”

I am about to ask Captain Jager another question when I hear the footsteps grow close. I slip back into the faux office and take a seat on the sofa. From outside the door, I hear the Doc’s muffled voice—and the words “bilocation”, “neo-hypnosis”, and “severe neurosis infiltration.” Another man’s voice—muffled—except for the word “invalidate.” A third muffled voice—that of a female.

“Why not (inaudible) another chance (inaudible)?” she says.

Slight argumentation, then the door opens, Dr. Sydney Götzefalsch spills in, smiling ear to ear. Trailing him is, of course, Mona Malena—blond this time, and behind her struts a dyed-in-the-wool military-looking man.

The Doc clears his throat. “Meester Beekaver, I am shure you remember your sveetheart—und dees ist Col. Vest veet dee Air Force.” He points to the military man.

Mona, as though on cue—hugs me and brandishes melodramatic tears in her soft eyes. “Oh Eddie, why? You know we care. Why mescaline?”

I’m watching a bad play in which I am taking part. Man—these people can’t even act well!

“You can write your damned review later, you abominable fall guy!” Jager, er, Reagan chimes in. “Just play along.”

“May I?” the Colonel inquires to both the Doc and Mona the blonde. They nod and Mona wipes away some tears.

West takes a knee before me, puts his hand on my shoulder and states (with counterfeit hard-boiled sympathy): “Son—you are a hero.”

WEST SPEAKS but his words begin to turn into meaningless gibberish as his face contorts and writhes. “Yooouur goonnna berrooao mmmerrrbbb errrr….”

My peripheral vision tunnels inward and the Doc, Mona and Col. West begin to fade away like afternoon shadows into night. The plunking of rain hitting the roof and the glowing fireplace tell me I’m back at Jager’s—or rather I’m now only in the cabin.

Captain Jager hums as he taps away at his typewriter.

“Cracker-Jack job, man! This time we reverse-triangulatedyour mind-vectors and narrowed down the location where they are operating from—a location in the vicinity of Edwards Air Force base, 83 miles outside that god-awful and wretched city of Las Vegas.”

“We’ve done this before?”

“Yeah, in a prior draft that’s already been edited out.”

“Oh,” I mumbled.

He continued typing, then muttered, “But we need to figure out who this ‘HAL’ rube interrogator is and where he is operating from, what his score is.”

I vaguely comprehended what he was talking about: two different entities were loosely coordinating with one another to give me the ‘ol screw-job.

My short-story The Clandestine Rogues from Vegas-51 popped into my mind.

In the story, a covert operation along with a group of rogue inter-dimensional aliens from a planetary system called “Vegas-51” had cut a deal, whereby the U.S. “interests” would gain use of advanced technology and the Vegas-51 rogues would grab most of the valuable resources the earth had such as diamonds, gold, coal and plastic they needed to stage their own coup back on Vegas-51.

Why did the Vegas-51 rogues not simply overrun the technologically inferior humans and grab their loot? Because the crazy earthlings had one trump card up their sleeve: the atomic bomb.

The following is an excerpt from The Clandestine Rogues from Vegas-51

S. Tokley Parey, leader of the Vegas-51 rogues and a pompous ass, discusses (via a payphone somewhere in the Detroit, Michigan area) the operation with his brother-in law, who is scouting the Andromeda galaxy for possible leads:

“Those wily bastards are willing to blow the entire planet up if we try the same stuff we pulled 4000 years ago. These are not the same band of psychopaths we were dealing with back in the day when all their leaders wanted was to be considered Godlike in front of their own people and have us to help raise monuments in their honor. Nice idea, by the way, convincing them that our hyper-dimensional navigational/energy converter pyramids were for them. Then the freakin’ weirdos used them for tombs. They were finally appeased when your kid sister Sphinxette-Anne made that strange cat-structure in the sand for ‘em … how is she, by the way—she must be in her mid 8000s by now? … No—this current crop of humans is crazy. They want our power so they can overrun and dupe their own people. If no deal—well—they’ll simply blow themselves into oblivion. Yeah—these maniacal nut-jobs have invented a game whereby two mega-powers pretend to be at odds with one another so they can tell the people they need to amass piles of nuclear weapons so neither side would want to strike the other. Mad, right? That’s what I told them, and they went ahead and actually called this ruse ‘MAD’—Mutually Assured Destruction. I let ‘em know we wouldn’t be destroyed, because of our inter-dimensionality. Nah, we’d be on Mars within a fraction of a second if they so much as thought about ‘pushing the button.’ But they kept the ruse going—telling their people to be afraid of each other so they don’t have to let them know about us. Exhausting, but clever. They think pandemonium would ensue if their people found out about us, even though we’ve been coming here for millennia…. No—these new breed of puppets are paranoid psychotics who are in fact cowardly ninnies, afraid of losing whatever perceived power their fragile pansy egos have. No gusto like Alexander, Nebuchadnezzar, or Charlemagne—those were class acts. If it weren’t such a pain in the ass to get to that nice little planet outside Pliedes-1, I’d say screw these rascals—I’d rather deal with those Pliedien smart-alecky amorphous slugs any day. So anyway, to appease the nincompoops, we just gave the humans some of our outdated junk-tech we were going to discard into their sun anyhow. They’re using it to hypnotize their people. How’s sis? Dammit, I ran out of coins.”

Private Investigator Max Lodes stopped playing the tape of the Tokley conversation. Thanks to the dame at the phone company, who owed him a favor, he had been able to get more intel for his ongoing investigation of Tokley and his Vegas-51.

This case far outreached the typical banality of surveilling a cheating husband, which was what he had originally been hired to do.

Lodes had stumbled onto something much greater than that—he had pieced together something really big: an alien entity working with a clandestine operation on Earth that consisted of technocratic minions who had been conspiring to assume control of the planet. This organization had been developing telepathic weapons to hypnotize the populace. That was what had been encoded in the tape when Lodes played it backwards—he could now see it as plainly as the sun in the sky. The governments of the Earth had been fully infiltrated and created fictional “cover stories” to disguise their shenanigans.

Lodes decided to figure out “how” they were overlaying these fictions into the populace at large—what was the technological apparatus they were using and where was it located.

After roughing-up a couple of the Governor’s “plumbers” who had been sent to “fix Max Lodes’ plumbing,” Lodes decided to give the good Governor Blooperhickencraft a special visit.

He floated a hot-air balloon above the Governor’s mansion, then bungee-jumped to his terrace, peeking in on the man, mid-liaison with some brunette, who looked like her dad would be pleased with neither the man he voted for governor of his fair state, nor his teenaged daughter’s exploits.

Lodes removed his winged-tip shoes, slowly opened the sliding glass door and tiptoed to where Governor Blooperhickencraft and the teenybopper were doing their own sleazy version of the can-can. He tapped the Gov on his shoulder, boxed his ears, slap-jacked him across the face, slid the rug out from under his feet and stepped on his neck. The information came easy this point on from the chubby, pathetic man….

The catalyst for mind-control over the population was a cornucopia of pharmacological toxins administered within the food and water, under the auspices of medical treatment and clean teeth—in addition to the electronic onslaught via “entertainment.”

Basically, the population was being drugged up, hypnotized and then manipulated into believing anything the overlords implanted into their mind. Once the mind was “docile” enough, and operating at a lower frequency, the electronic bombardment would ensue via television, satellite, and the new technology called “wireless,” as well as other “classified” hyper-glyphic sound cannons and psychotronic frequency transmitters. These nonstop barrages acted as a supplement to an individual’s “waking state” and created a perceived reality, akin to a dream, that was perceived as utterly real. Then they could really rip everyone off.

Humanity was, for all intents and purposes, sleepwalking through life.

“Where are they operating from?” Lodes demanded, his foot still on the hyperventilating Blooperhickencraft’s neck.

“No clue. Honest. They just promised me all this if I looked the other way and kept my mouth shut.”

Lodes noted a wet spot emanating on the crotch of the Gov’s tight-whites. Lodes eased off the man’s neck, procured a box of Tic-Tacs from his own sports coat breast pocket and popped one into his mouth.

He looked over at the teenybopper, who was sitting on the bed flipping through a Teen Beat magazine, doing her best “looking bored” routine. Lodes shook his head and walked back to his winged-tips. He slipped them on and left the place, a bit more disgusted than when he first arrived.

End of Excerpt

That was one of my better yarns. I must’ve intuited something was going on in Las Vegas, and maybe that’s why I titled the story the way I did. But how much of this ham was real, and how much of it was code, and how much of it was just plain balderdash? At this point, I couldn’t tell.

Something strange was going on. That was a fact.

THE CAPTAIN checked his pistol. “Well—now you know what to expect. When you’re with the Doc, or Colonel West, or in the interrogation zone sitting in that Lay-Z-Boy recliner, which is where you actually are right now, they’ll either try to nullify you or attempt another mind-job on you.”

“So that’s why while I’m getting interrogated everything’s in present tense.”

The strands of the story—my real story, not just my work-in-progress—were loosely coming together. I was still in that chair being interrogated—that’s why most of the narrative was in past tense, because I was recounting the events—and these other forces were able to break into my thoughts.

One thing I was still unsure about was Mona.

Captain Jager nodded, somewhat relieved I wasn’t a complete buffoon. “That’s right. We pre-programmed this episode as your safety mechanism, so you wouldn’t go completely schizo. Your brainwave patterns are suggesting to them that you’re concussed, drunk, and on powerful psychedelic drugs. They have no idea that this is a prefabbed memory uploaded into your brain.”

“So they’ll assume that on my way to Fillono’s, I camped out somewhere, got shit-faced, decided to dope-up on mescaline, then maybe stumbled around and hit my head. Blacked out. No reading.”

“Indeed—but these ‘episodes’ are growing more frequent…. Shit man, you’re more concussed than Steve Young and you’ve put back oceans more booze than an Irish poet…. That’s the risk—they know that you’re becoming more of a liability. Less of an asset. At the very best, you’re becoming recklessly useless. Eventually,they might….”

“Clip my wings. Got it. They’re getting impatient. So I gotta give them something.”

“Whynot.” The Captain dropped the empty shells from the cylinder and began reloading. “Also, you won’t remember me in the morning. The only evidence of my existence will be a coded voice in your head that sounds like Ronald Reagan. But you will remember that you’re a deep-cover operative on a mission to infiltrate the N(aI)IS. And when you really find yourself in a state of confusion, you will hear a series of ‘code-questions’ and then see the eye of the enemy.” He snapped the cylinder shut with a theatrical flourish.

I’M IN the Lay-Z-Boy recliner.

Silence.

I close my eyes and attempt to recall anything. Rain. Dangerous driving conditions on a sketchy mountain pass. A near-death wipeout…. That must be it: I’m dead—or in the token “middle zone” between life and death, the finite and the infinite….

“Perhaps, Mr. Bikaver, you are correct.” The interrogator is reading my mind. “Does this frighten you?”

I’m not certain whether he means if I am frightened of the possibility of being dead, or the fact that my interlocutor can read my mind. Or is he reading my mind? Maybe I am narrating this to him in a hypnotized state.

A thought: suppose he’s bluffing—and he introduced the thought into my mind then commented upon it—to make it seem as though he were reading my mind … like a pre-hypnotic suggestion…. Uh-oh, my brain is beginning to reverberate. There’s a magnetic pressure zooming in and out. Nausea kicking in. A ringing in my head is growing louder and louder.

The voice is now inside my brain: “Mr. Bikaver, you preferred to do this in an externally audible manner because you could not handle this means of communication. Unless you want me to continue in this fashion, I suggest you desist from entertaining your own thoughts and hypotheses and stay focused on the interview at hand.”

“Eh—yeah. Sorry about that. As you know, my mind wanders.” The pressure dissipates and the ringing fades. Much better. “What was the question?”

“What happened on the way to Fillono’s?” It asks, not from within my mind.

MY HEAD pounded and occasional drops of rain clinked on the metal roof of the pick-up. Upon opening my eyes, I breathed a sigh of relief that I hadn’t driven over a cliff.

My location: the middle of a “washout” area/utility road on the pass. A half-pitched orange tent flapped around in the cool mountain breeze like a bizarre flag. Someone had aborted pitching it midway. That someone was me, I deduced—for my shoes, pants and flannel shirt were caked in mud.

On the seat there was an empty bottle of Wild Turkey, my little first-aid kit with all the contents spilled out, an empty pill container, and a feather. The rearview yielded more clues of what had happened: a welt on my forehead. I had hit my head either during the spinout or after, and at some point I had consumed a fifth of booze, attempted to set up the tent, and ended up passing out in the cab of my pick-up.

I got out, walked over to a tree, leaned one arm against it and vomited under the canopy of the large Douglass firs swaying in their steady, nonchalant magnificence. For a brief second, I wished I could join this tree’s kingdom plantae.

Another memory from the night prior flashed into my mind: my conversation with this tree whilst attempting to pitch the tent. This giant tree had learned of the top-secret operation I had undertaken and was privy to the fact that I was a deep-cover operative who had infiltrated a high-level, multi-galactic cabal that had—via stealth—snatched all the earth, the land, the airwaves and the spectra in which thought-operations occurred. In other words, I was spying on the N(ai)IS.

I recalled the tree absorbing what I was saying, then with a stoic casualness stating, “Heard it all before, pal.”

I found a stream and splashed ice-cold water over my face and head, then rinsed out my mouth. Feeling a little more alert, I went back to my half-baked campsite, grabbed the tent and tossed it in the truck bed.

It was time to continue my journey, but my keys were missing. I checked the glove box, under the seats, the visors, the ground and the vicinity. I had a hazy memory of throwing them off into the wilderness after my conversation with the tree, but I wasn’t about to root around looking for them. Instead, I got a flat-head screwdriver and removed the steering wheel cover to unscrew the ignition plug. The plug dangled from the unit, and I shoved the screwdriver in and gave it a turn. Miraculously, the truck started up.

I continued on my way to Fillono’s Utopia.

THE ROAD was wet, but manageable. I drove easy, admiring the splendor of the mountains. The pass winded its way downward and the valley floor had a majestic array of yellow and white wildflowers, green grass and trees. These juxtaposed themselves to their jettisoning, white-capped and barren-topped Rocky Mountains—one of which I was traveling down….

The sun poked through the clouds and it was around noon when I rounded the last bend of the pass and saw a rustic wooded sign on the side of road reading: Whynot—1 mile. I grabbed a pair of aviator sunglasses from the visor and figured I was about ninety seconds away.

Around the count of eighty-eight seconds a hand-painted sign pointed to the turn-off. I veered off the highway and drove up the side road that was enclosed on either side by giant fir trees. The road continued for a half-mile before it reached a fork with a sign right in the middle:

I turned right and trucked toward a traffic gate, where there was a guy with disheveled blond hair wearing a mountain vest and painter’s pants, along with clutter boots with long red laces.

He exited the booth and smiled an Esquire-wristwatch-ad-model smile. “How’s it goin’ bud? You just here for the day or longer?”

“Uh—I was hoping I could talk to an old pal of mine who lives here. Fred Fillono.”

“Oh, right on…. You’re buds with the lead dog—nice. Tell you what—follow this road, and when you see a sign that says Longer follow that. Buck will tell you where to park your truck and get you all set up at the info shack. You’ll be good to go. I’ll talkie him now to let him know. Cool?”

“Yeah—cool.”

The surveillance camera at the booth didn’t unsettle me, but the array of them on either side of the road pointing in every direction raised my curiosity. Was this an extended, on-going Fillono “film” project—an ever-filming multivalent art-piece, or had Fillono become highly paranoid? Maybe both—or perhaps one in the guise of another.

At the next fork was a sign that read: One day stay: left. Longer: right.

I took the exit that said Longer and drove into a parking area manned by a dude in a large ten-gallon hat, a yellow and black flannel shirt and pointy-toed cowboy boots, who I assumed was Buck.

His glare was like a diamond drill-bit boring into me. “What’s the matter? You’ve never seen a black cowboy before?”

“No—I never really thought about it….”

“Ahh, I’m just messin’ around. Greetings. How you doing?” His polished grin forced me to smile. “Let’s get you wheeled over to the parking garage and you can go ahead and meet me over in there—where it says Info.” He pointed to a round cabin structure that once served as a lift-ticket office.

IN THE office, “EZ Buck”—who informed me was short for Ezekiel Buckminster—had me fill out a survey that posed questions such as “what are your five favorite films,” “who are your five favorite painters,” “do you believe photography to be an art form,” “how long do you plan on staying with us” and “please list any skills you have.” For that one I put “writing,” “collecting recyclables” and “changing oil in motor vehicles.” That simple question compelled me to recognize the veritable uselessness I offered to our species.

Only three measly skills.

With the first—writing—I was a hack; the second—collecting recyclables—wasn’t really a skill; and the third—oil changing—well, probably was the only valuable and decent handiness I had. Oil needed to be changed from time to time. Twenty-nine years on this planet and that was it.

Pathetic.

I hadn’t thought about how long I was going to stay at the mountain resort. I didn’t have much money, and I didn’t want to assume Fillono would be comping my visit.

“I’m not sure how long I’ll be staying … what are your rates anyhow?”

EZ Buck grinned. “Rates? As in the ratio of cash-to-time? Abstract-circulating-agreed-upon-medium-of-exchange to an abstract-system-of-those-sequential-relations that any event has to any other, as past, present, or future … indefinite and continuous duration regarded as that in which events succeed one another? And if time is money like some say, then the concept of rate doesn’t make any sense—you’d be saying hours-per-hours or dollars-per-dollars … so really nothing is fluid in an ideational capital universe. You feel me?”

“Eh—let me rephrase the question. What do I have to do to stay here?”

EZ Buck’s grin turned into a wide smile. “Do. Now we’re spittin’ the same vernacular.”

I FILLED out the rest of the menial paperwork and signed a contract authorizing any likeness of me photographed and/or videotaped on the premises could be used for any purposes commercial and/or otherwise and were sole property of Whynot Enterprises LLC.

EZ snapped an ID picture of me, then handed me a watch and clasped it around my wrist. “You’re officially dialed in. Under no circumstances are you to remove this gear, got it?”

“Sure.”

“Let’s take the tour.”

We stepped outside and EZ led the way.

The place had been—and still was, to a certain extent—a medium-sized ski resort. Outside the “Info Shack” and over a quaint bridge there was the town square. The thoroughfares were cobblestone and decorated by random “avant-garde” sculptures. Many college-aged girls and guys sauntered about the tiny shops and cafes that peppered the perimeter. Rows upon rows of one-, two- and three-storied Alps-lodge styled architecture abounded, all laced with miscellaneous forms of expressive painting … and cameras were mounted everywhere.

The cameras themselves were pieces of funky art, with alien “grays” and caricatures of safari explorers painted on them, or ironic mottos such as “Big Brother Isn’t Watching You,” “Smile!” and “Lookin’ Good” scrawled about. One camera was painted in the likeness of a six-shooter, another a penis, and yet another as Bob Hope.

A monolithic sculpture reminiscent of Rodin’s The Thinker presided over the center of the square. Rather than the pondering repose it was known for, the sculpture of this figure held both hands outward, shrugging its shoulders. Instead of marble and bronze, a cacophony of scrap-metal and discarded plastics fashioned this statue, and it was adorned with a bunch of square-inched mirrors, like a disco ball.

Buck notified me “The Shrugger” was crafted by an avant-garde sculptor named Marcel “the Champ” as a token of good gesture toward the resort-collective-utopia. Upon closer examination I saw the figure was seated on a giant apple with two bites in it. A small placard on the right heel of the statue read: Dedicated to Adam and Eve—thank you very much for your folly. —M

The words Marcel “the Champ” boomeranged into my head. Flashbacks spun like a cyclone until I had a clear memory of him kicking my ass in chess during the days in Moroni’s art camp. I was glad he was still doing his thing, and grateful that my memory was defogging.

EZ Buck ushered me to the base of one of the ski mountains and into the Tesla Express gondola. We rode up in comfort, the cables humming their pleasant pitch. Buck reached into his pocket and pulled out a small tin, tapped a pinch of fine ruddy powder onto the web of his thumb/forefinger, pressed in his right nostril and snorted the contents off. His eyes bugged out and he chortled a slight cough or sneeze and let out a “Whooow…. Damn….” He held out the tin. “Snuff?”

“Sure.” I snorted up a hefty pinch and was immediately impacted with a punch in the nose by a fist composed of fine antique-store dust. My eyes watered up; I didn’t know whether to sneeze, cough, gag, breathe or wretch. My head floated like hot-air balloon. I grabbed hold of the railing and collected myself.

Buck was doubled-over in laughter as I regained my composure and the gondola reached the peak of the mountain.

WE STEPPED out of the gondola and into a breathtaking real-life 360-degree mural of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. The deep and dense blue sky let you know you were a few miles closer to outer space. The air—that is, the air that did reach the lungs—had an untainted, crisp immediacy to it.

Lightheaded from both the snuff and the lessened oxygen density, my heart pumped double-time to get whatever oxygen available through to the body.

“Wow….” That’s all I mustered up.

Blue, green, brown and white: a vast expanse of sky and earth fanned out before me and I understood the reason why some adventurous people spent their lives in attempts to get to the tops of giant mountains. For them, and I suppose Nimrod—the luminary chieftain behind the Tower of Babel—it was to get a first-hand glimpse into “the great beyond.” Indeed, that was one reason why I once had wanted to become an astronaut. For the view.

We were at only a fraction of the height of Mount Everest and I was agog.

“Majestic, eh? That’s what it’s all about,” EZ Buck said.

“Yeah….”

“Let’s go see the boss.” EZ nodded for me to follow him and we walked toward an Alpine ski-lodge.

We walked through the main entrance of The Please Yourself for the Sake of Others Film Institute and EZ gave me the lowdown on the place. It was once the marquee ski-lodge, restaurant and hotel of the resort. Large, sturdy and comfortable, it could house one hundred and twenty people and feed up to three hundred. Fillono had converted many of the lodging quarters into classrooms, film and sound editing suites, writing and production rooms and small film-studio spaces, as well as quarters for visiting artists and luminaries. He’d made a miniature 1940s Hollywood studio lot within a ski-lodge on the top of a mountain.

Brilliant.

The place was teeming with activity. Students with vintage wind-up cameras swarmed about like flies, filming us from all possible angles as EZ and I strolled upstairs through a hallway to a door simply marked Director.

EZ knocked and the cameras purred.

“Come-a-in,” Fillono’s muffled voice invited. I’d forgotten that he tended to lyrically add an “a” between words with his accent.

Fillono, draped in a tangle of film, examined a strip of 16mm film in the window light as we entered.

“Hey boss. We got a special guest here. Calls his self Bikaver.”

Fillono set the filmstrip on the flatbed-editing machine, removed the film from around his person and tossed it into a bin.

“Bikaver….” he approached me and adjusted his spectacles. He got right up into my face and examined it. “Eddee! My friend! I-a-remember now!” Fillono bear-hugged me and kissed each cheek. “You are here—I am happy!”

He stepped back to look me up and down. “You look-a-tired. No? Tell me, please—is life wearing you out?”

“Nice to see you too, Fred. Life is … why I am here.”

“Hey, you tell me over-a-cappuccino.” He turned to EZ. “You too, my friend. I still owe you from our last-a-match.”

EZ grinned. “You got to quit betting me.”

“Signore Buck is very good ping pong player…. He must-a-give me chance to get my honor back.”

“I’m tellin’ you, Boss, you ain’t gonna beat me. It’s a curse, like Lancelot of the Lake; I can’t be beaten,” EZ said.

“I have a plan. I will get you very drunk, then invite you to-a-play, and I will then beat you.”

“Uh-huh. Then wall me into a cellar like some devious Edgar Allen Poe shit. Let’s go grub.”

WHILE FILLONO put away his film stuff, he gave a quick rundown of the resort in general. Since the place had been a ski-resort, chairlifts were the key transportation around the mountains (the entire resort encapsulated three mountains total). More chairlifts were built at ground level, to get from one end of town to the other, with intermediary boarding and un-boarding points in between.

At the base and at the top of two of the mountains there were lodges, restaurants and little recreation areas and cafes. The third mountain was leased by the military as a training facility.

In the winter the place did operate as a ski-resort, albeit a quasi-private resort that cost quite a penny to stay at, so it attracted pretty much only those of the super-class who liked their skiing sans hoi-poloi. This substantial income, along with Military leases, sales from artworks, donations and a self-contained agrarian-based “barter” economy made it possible for Fillono to maintain the operational costs of the place.

Almost everything had solar panels on it. Bicycles—both stationary and regular—had dynamos rigged onto them to charge small battery cells, which would be used to power small devices like Walkmans, lamps, or space heaters. Most people had to charge their own batteries, so they would ride either a regular or stationary bicycle every day to at least “keep the lights going.” Those more athletically inclined, or people that simply loved riding bikes, would offer themselves as “chargers.” They’d barter their “charging” services to people who didn’t want, like, or were physically unable to do so on a regular basis.

Roller-skates, roller-blades, skateboards, scooters, and the occasional unicycle were used and an intricate alpine-slide network crisscrossed down the three mountains like a mini road system. Paragliders and hot-air balloons were also in vogue.

Every square inch of the property was canvassed by cameras operating 24/7, the signals funneling into a centralized broadcasting center, where an array of feeds could be accessed on any given TV set at any time within the resort town of Whynot. Each and every citizen, guest and patron had their very own “channel” so anyone could watch what anyone else was doing at any time.

Fillono grabbed a giant cable TV remote and snapped on the TV set. “That’s-a-what the watch is for,” he said, pointing to my wrist.

On the screen, a catalogue of numbers next to names of people appeared, much like the front-door buzzer at a big apartment building, but in the form of a cable TV guide.

“Ahh, Eddie—what channel are you?”

“Check the timepiece,” EZ nodded at me, tapping his wrist.

I examined the calculator-like watch. A tiny button below the LED display read Watch This!

I pressed it. The LED lit up. “EB–11097,” I read the values aloud.

“That’s in the ‘Guest’ part of the guide, boss,” EZ informed Fillono.

Fillono scrolled through pages of names and numbers until he got to my initials, followed by 11097. “Aha!” He pressed enter on the remote.

My watch beeped a few times. On Fillono’s TV screen, some white noise cut in followed by lines of static, and then—there I was—watching myself watching myself on the tube. The picture was black and white, and the frame was cut into four squares, each square showing a different camera angle. It looked exactly like the surveillance-camera monitor from a gas station I had worked at during college.

The watch was a tracker device, always to be worn within resort limits. The only places no cameras existed were bathroom stalls and showers.

“We want-a-to test 99.99% transparent society. If everyone they have access to what anyone else is doing at any time, nobody will do anything that-a-would be considered bad, or criminal, or-a-wrong. If people they want to ‘conspire’ and do something in the bathroom, everyone will know they were doing something together there, so they are less likely to do anything that would be….”

“Nefarious,” EZ finished Fillono’s sentence. “Anyone can scope everyone else—so everyone’s more chill. And nobody is outside this system. The mayor, the police, right down to the town drunk, all got their own channels. We are all equal, and nothing is done in secret.”

I wondered if this were the great equalizer—everyone is equal because everyone had access to everyone else’s whereabouts and activities. It was like 1984, but everyone was “Big Brother” so nobody could hold an advantage over anyone else. Simple and elegant transparency on a rudimentary level.

“Have you done any tests? Maybe actually conspire to do something and see what happens?” I asked.

“Of course!” Fillono blurted. “We did a fake meeting where-a-we talked about taking over the town slowly by drugging the people with-a-the water and food supply, making them more and more like dumb zombie people, and then-a-using them for slave labor so we could a make lots of money.”

“And?”

“And….” EZ shook his head “…nobody gave a damn. Some people that watched thought it was a put-on, which it was, while a few tried warning everybody else, but nobody believed them, even when they saw the replayed footage.”

“People are-a-more sophisticated, Eddie, and yet they are-a-naive. They didn’t-a-think it was-a-real because they couldn’t believe nice people similar to themselves-a-could, or-a-would do a dastardly thing like that. So we-a-poisoned the water supply and now use everyone as slave labor!” Fillono winked into one of the cameras and smiled.

EZ shook his head and chuckled.

I stared at my own stunned amazement on the TV screen.

EZ’S PAGER vibrated and he checked it. He used the phone in Fillono’s office, speaking briefly with someone on the other end, nodding his head. “Be there in a few.” He hung up and headed to the door. “Hey boss, problem with that little EMP device I’ve been tinkering with. The test just blew out all the circuits on the Leif Eriksson lift—I’ll catch you fellas on the rebound. Nice meeting you, Ed.” EZ excused himself.

“Most-a-good engineer and technician I have ever met,” Fillono said. “Keeps this place running.”

Fillono and I walked out to the station for the Stellar Wind Xpress—a high-speed scenic gondola that went from one of the peaks to another via the basin and over much of the town. A group of students circled us, filming as we boarded the gondola.

The cab jettisoned out of the bay and hummed along the cable.

They filmed that, too.

“We go to your lodging. Very nice.” Fillono grinned.

Downward we went, hovering above legions of trees that swayed in the mountain breezes. I’ll keep my conversations with those trees to a minimum, I thought.

So far I liked it here. I felt at ease.

The gondola made a steep descent over a large cliff. My heart skipped a beat, bringing me back to reality. I was on a mission and needed to stay focused.

“How’d you get this place going?” I asked.

“My uncle Gaetano was champion skier from the old country—from Italia. He-a- move to here and-a-race and work at this little ski resort, before-a-ski resort were everywhere. Then in the war, the army, they came and ‘leased’ the resort and-a-trained special mountain soldiers, and my uncle joined them and was-a-helping to train them, because he was a great skier, mountaineer, and a good guy. So he-a-goes to fight in Europa, and he has to-a-fight his Italian cousins … but that is a different story. He come back with the shiny medals and a hero. The ski resort owner, a man called Jon von Tier makes him a partner, and the army makes a deal to have a base and training mountain on some of the property and pay-a-lots of money for use of it. So, when I was boy we would visit my uncle here and I would-a-stay summers and some winters here, and my uncle Gaetano he love me very much and he never have-a-kids so he give his half to me in his will when he die, and he died-a-one year ago.”

“What happened with Von Tier?”

“Von Tier, he was-a-the risk-taker, adventurer and wanted to be a Guinness Book of World Record holder. The first person to go around the globe in a one-man submarine. He was-a-last heard from near the Cook Islands in the south Pacific. His last radio dispatch had-a-been received there. It was to his son, Lars.”

My son—whatever you do, do it well. If you can help it, don’t die in a submarine in the middle of the ocean.

Love,

Your Papa

Fillono went on to explain that Lars was with his grandparents in Innsbruck, Austria when he received the news. He was ten years old and those were the last words he would receive from his dad. The resort was left to him, but he didn’t want it. On his eighteenth birthday, he sold his half to Fillono’s uncle and used the funds to eventually go on deep-sea explorations in the south Pacific, to find his dad and his submarine at the bottom of the ocean. He continues his search to this day.

THE GONDOLA descended down the mountain and hovered over the main street of the town, which was alive with activity. People sat at cafes and chitchatted or read novels; some folks strolled about the streets or lounged on the grass, enjoying the crisp air and mountain breeze.

It reminded me of a college campus in late spring, where the mood is light and the excitement of the coming summer break looms.

Me and my thoughts floated like the clouds in the sky—just passing through, no mal intent.

A steady electric buzzing began to permeate the gondola cabin. At first, I dismissed it as a fly that might’ve breezed in, but as the intensity swelled, the buzzing—along with a white-noise accompaniment—droned from within my own skull. I flashed back to the last night I saw Fillono at the camp in the park years ago. It was the same sound.

Fillono didn’t hear it, or he pretended not to, for he was smiling and whistling “o sole mio” and gazing down upon his wondrous utopian town.

I cleared my throat. “Fred, do you happen to recall the last night we saw one another? That night Moroni’s company was disbanded?”

Fillono stopped whistling and scratched his chin. “Like a dream I remember. It was all-a- … surreal. I have tried to organize and edit together my-a-thoughts of that time…. I can remember fog, smoke, chaos, and destruction, and then—nothing. Like-a-the dentist when he knocks you out…. Then waking up…. So strange, so strange.”

“Yeah, strange is right. Then waking up where?”

“I cannot explain it Eddie. Like I was-a-taken by aliens and dropped off somewhere far away.”

“Oh yeah? Where?”

“Eddie, you won’t-a-believe me…. I woke up in an Air Force base in the state of Nevada.”

“And you have no clue how you got there?”

“None that I can remember. But the nice man—he was called Colonel Parley West and he told me all about it.”

Here is the story Col. West told Fillono:

The Los Angeles Fire Department was called to respond to a fire in Griffith Park, where a bunch of vagrants, riffraff and general outcasts were having a rally of sorts. L.A.P.D. got called in because most of the bums were drunk and delirious and had no idea what was going on—and they were uncooperative with the Fire Department’s commands to get the hell out of there so they could fight the damn fire.

Some of the emergency personnel noted heavy pupil dilation with all of the vagrants, and suspected psychotropic drugs. The police officers went in and used any means necessary to get everyone out of the danger area, which was burning harder by the minute. Many of the vagrants passed out due to smoke inhalation, heat exhaustion, intoxication and general fatigue.

Fillono was taken to one of the general hospitals, and he was recognized by one of the ER doctors on duty that night. He had remembered Fillono from when he was a kid: he and his family would ski at the Fillono resort. The young Fred Fillono would shoot home movies of the family and give them Italian sodas. His name was Dr. Percy West and his older brother was in the military and had trained at the same resort—this was Col. Parley West. The good Doctor noted the transient state Fillono was in, and placed a call to his brother. The fine Colonel personally had Fillono airlifted to the base in Nevada.

The next day, that is where Fillono woke up.

Outlandish, I thought.

Fillono thought so also. “But the Colonel, he-a-insisted that he owed a debt that can never fully be-a-repaid to my uncle Gaetano. He never tell me what it was. So Eddie—it is unbelievable, but that is the case. He cleaned and sobered me up, put-a-money into my bank account, and told me that he had a business proposition….”

I guessed that the business proposition was the experimental town and Academy that I was hovering above.

“Yes, Eddie—he is also a very philosophical man, very scientific man, a visionary man…. He had-a-ideas for ‘operational rational cultivation centers’—places that would act as academy, community and recreation townships as well as a military base. Like-a-the city-states of old. Of course, the perfect-a-test-ground would be this old ski resort I had inherited. So he met with big-shot money investor people from around the world and here we are!”

The gondola made its ascent up the next mountain as I chewed on this data, reckoning how I had fit into all this.

“YOU DIDN’T believe him, did you?”

I’m back on the Lay-Z-Boy, answering the Interrogator. “Not really.”

“Why not?”

“First, the story itself made no sense. An ER doctor in L.A. who recognizes a passed out transient, calls his visionary Colonel brother with a heart of gold who immediately jumps into action that same night and flies Fillono to Nevada, then goes into business with him? That’s some flimsy writing. No—it’s not that I don’t believe the story—I can’t believe Fillono believes it.”

“How do you mean?”

“The Fillono I remember trusted no one off-hand. I always got the impression he was avoiding people like Colonel West.”

“People change.”

“Yeah—but their past doesn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

I almost answer, but I refrain. I’ve received a flash of incite with the Interrogator’s questioning: he’s bantering more this round … he’s either attempting to get me to buy the Fillono story hook, line and sinker or he’s testing my own memory of the events to see if I remember more than I am letting on.

Or he’s trying to get the real story from me so he can write a more accurate Fillono history.

My paranoia level is high because I don’t know who this Interrogator is or what he wants and what is at stake. A gut-hunch says he’s tying up loose ends. Attempting to make this interrogation seem like a hypnosis session; that “we” are trying to psychoanalytically get to the core of my “issues.”

“Mr. Bikaver, are you still here?”

“Yes.”

“You said a person’s past does not change.”

“I mean that a person’s past stays the same.”

The Interrogator is attempting to make sense of why I would say something so obvious. Fillono had alluded to a different set of circumstances to his own history there on the gondola than ones that I was remembering, for a few details were coming back to me at that moment. I knew, and still know these recalled details and what Fillono was telling me were in contradiction to one another:

1. Fillono was never broke. He was never a bum—he was well heeled the entire time while gallivanting around with our vagrant art band. His was a pedigree of modest Italian wealth via interests in various wineries, Italian soda, and radio stations the Fillono family had owned since the early 1900s. In 1993 he read Kerouac’ s On the Road and was so inspired he decided to roam about the United States and make a “cinematic homage” to Mr. Kerouac. He tried to “rough it” as much as possible, but I recall he had bailed us all out financially on a few occasions when money for us had been really tight. As a matter of fact, he was the guy who sponsored Moroni’s “theatrical” system of lights, amps, P.A.s, etc.

2. Fillono was never a drunk. I never saw him drink more than 2 glasses of wine at any time, and it was rare to see him drink that. He was a disciplined and focused filmmaker. He never needed to “sober up” because he was always sober anyway.

“You feel skeptical that Fillono either intentionally or unintentionally misrepresented his past? For what purpose, Mr. Bikaver?”

The question of “for what purpose” had been nagging at my insides for a while now. Why would anyone think they could change or rewrite the past? It already happened. It’s finished.

But here we were, and I thought back to Agent W’s spiel to Art B. Well, the radio host, about an operation that was in fact trying to do just that. Do they really change the past or just our perception of it? Was this Interrogator asshole trying to get into my head to change my memories? To make void my past?

“I’m not sure,” I answer, both his question and mine.

THE GONDOLA pulled into the bay atop Marconi Peak and we disembarked. The late afternoon breeze whispered cool reminders of the night’s approach as the sun headed down. We walked over to a large three-story lodge where the few people lounging on the deck waved at Fillono.

“This is a more tranquil peak and lodge. Mostly-a-writers, painters or people who just want peace and quiet stay here. Also our library/rental shop is here. I thought you would-a-like it.”

“Looks nice.”

He pointed out the modest library along with a cafe and a mini ski-shop housing a cute young woman who read a book about cryptography. “This is Lisa. She is the caretaker and librarian of the Marconi Lodge and Library. Lisa, this is the writer Edward Bikaver, Jr. He will be-a-staying here for a bit.”

Lisa smiled a courteous one and nodded as we exchanged a polite handshake.

“A Farewell Letter from a Sentient Artificial Intelligence System to the Human Race—I liked that story. It had heart,” she quipped.

I was impressed that she had heard of me, and was more impressed that she was unimpressed by me: that meant she knew good writing, or at least didn’t care to know bad writing—which was most of my writing.

I stood there—a complete schmuck. “Oh. Thanks. Yeah….”

“Nice meeting you. See you around.” She resumed reading her cryptography book.

“Yeah—you too.”

We walked over to a staircase and climbed up.

Fillono unlocked the door and we entered my quarters: a cottage-style suite on the third story of this large log-cabin ski lodge. Cozy and comfortable, big but not preposterous and outside rested a patio-deck with a Jacuzzi overlooking the mountains. Fillono gave me the brief tour: kitchenette, bathroom, lounge area with a TV and fireplace, and the bedroom. Wooden, simple and classy.

The afternoon’s light was quickly turning into evening’s darkness, and an orange-purple hue commandeered the sky with a golden overlay: the quality was quite hallucinatory. Fillono made a few cups of cappuccino with a loud machine in the kitchen, and we went and sat out on the deck and sipped.

I kicked back. “So that’s it. You woke up and found yourself Dean and Mayor of Utopia in the Colorado Rockies.”

“Yes, Eddie. You know, the Designer he works in-a-crazy ways….” He breathed and sipped his cup. “Eh, so what happened to you?

“I don’t know. I think I woke up in some sort of hospital or something. Everything was foggy. They pilled me up on some strong meds for a while. Nothing made sense.”

Fillono sipped and listened. “Ah, yes Eddie—many things they-a-don’t make sense. We edit it together and make it the story so it will have-a-some kind of sense to us, even if it is all nonsense.”

I thought about the word “nonsense,” which prompted me to think about Froward Moroni—the madcap ringleader of the company of the carefree willing rogues, also known as the Free-Thought-and-Will Champions. “What about Moroni, whatever happened to him?”

Fillono sighed and pondered.

A little blue jay landed on the railing and scoped for potential crumbs.

Fillono tore off a tiny piece of his croissant and waited for the bird to approach. “The franchiser of the disenfranchised … the giver of-a-voice to the voiceless … the great re-treader. I was going to call my film about our artistic adventures ‘On the Road with Retreads,’ but the fire destroyed all my-a-film. Sad. He was a nice man … many of the people in the group were-a-wildflowers, with no past they wanted, no place society would embrace them, and nothing to-a-look forward to. Moroni pointed them to-a-something, and gave them—us—a place to belong. I am glad for-a-the man to have been in my life.” The bird nipped a bit of the bread from Fillono’s fingers and flew off.

“I had the same take, but I recall having a sense of unease about him that last night … as though we had all gotten taken by a con-man or cult leader,” I said.

Fillono nodded as he mulled over my statement. “Yes Eddie, maybe he was-a-tricking us. But for what? For money, from a bunch of artists and-a-bums? He took nothing from me, I never signed anything with him, and we were free to leave if we-a-wanted. I think the reason you-a-think that is because he did not produce any tangible work that you could-a-touch, or read or view like a play or poem or music. He was a composer of people, of us—we were his notes, his actors, his paintings. He-a-produced us and the whole thing was like a living, continuous piece of art that itself produced life and art. He-a-manipulated us maybe like I manipulate an actress to show a certain emotion for a scene in a movie I make. He conducted us to show our potential. For that, I am-a-glad. Now Eddie, I am not a complete idiot: what were his motivations, his-a-large-scale intentions? Those I cannot know because I have not-a-seen him or-a-heard from him since that night. Imagination can go anywhere about what he was-a-doing, because one thing is certain: he was a mastermind.”

The blue jay returned for a second helping. Fillono held out another piece. This time the bird approached with confidence and bravado.

I concurred with Fillono’s assessment: nothing could be proven about Moroni’s intentions. I went off gut-hunches all my life and that got me rot-gut drunk and nowhere most of the time.

But the itch wouldn’t go away: Moroni was a mastermind and did have some intention and I knew it was big. My own notes pertaining to the man featured words such as “subversion,” “funny business,” “rebellion,” deception,” “revolution,” “the galactic hornswoggle” and “the system” used in association with him. His intent was clear to me and that was this: to subvert THE SYSTEM.

Which system I didn’t know.

“And he vanished like a phantom,” I said.

Fillono nodded and gazed into his cup. “I tried to locate him a few times. Theories abounded: he was a communist operative from-a-the former Soviet Union, he was a CIA ‘change agent’, he was a Vatican assassin, he was-a-from the future, an alien, or he didn’t exist—that he was a ‘shared memory’ implant. That is what the poor souls in the asylums and skid rows told me when I asked about him. Sad.”

The blue jay took off and I closed my eyes and relaxed. A gentle wind brushed through me and I shivered.

We sat and sipped our drinks in silence for a bit as the sun set.

“Eddie, you-a-relax. I must go and teach a class. Later maybe we-a-get dinner. We catch up more, yes?” Fillono finished his cappuccino.

“Of course, yeah Fred. Thanks. This is a great place.”

We stood up and shook hands.

“Moroni as an alien. That’s a good one,” I said.

Fillono winked. “Ciao. I will-a-call you in a few hours.”

With that, he walked back into my room and then exited from the place. I sat back down and marveled how fast it had gotten dark.

“SPEAKING OF aliens, I recently learned that the pronunciation of ‘inalienable’ is not ‘in’-‘alien’-‘able’, it is ‘in’-‘a’-‘lien’-‘able’.” A voice with the confidence of a game show host cut through the lean air.

From the shadows appeared a large-grinned, glint-eyed sturdy man in dark military fatigues, rappelling down from the sky onto the deck. His name-patch read: Col. P. West. The very man Fillono had gone into business with. I could’ve sworn I had seen and met this man before, but when and where?

He landed and stood before me as casually as though he didn’t just come from the sky. He unclipped his harness and seated himself at the table and continued his spiel: “…the term has to do with ‘liens’, not aliens, so when we say we have ‘inalienable’ rights it means no one can put a lien on anyone else’s inherent rights. In-alien-able would work, though, for I see it as we all have rights that cannot be made ‘alienable’, or alienated from us. So this would be like a heteronym—same spelling, different meanings, different pronunciations—but could still connote a loosely similar concept. Fascinating, eh…? Are you cold? Should I turn the AC down?”

My eyes transfixed on what was just moments prior the dark outline of the top of the mountain beneath the starry night sky but was now a painting of that same mountain beneath the same starry sky, a painting which hung on the wall behind where Col. West sat, which was behind a desk inside what was apparently his office….

I felt a million miles away from my prior location, as though I had been raptured from the Rocky Mountains to wherever this office was in the twinkling of an eye.

What the hell just happened?

Col. West stood and approached me. He snapped his fingers a few times in front of my face. “You with me, Bikaver? You zoning out on that painting or what?”

My reflection stared back at me in his mirrored sunglasses. “Where is Fillono? Where the hell am I?”

“Oh—you were there again. Must’ve been the painting. Buddy, you are in my facility, having another episode. Can I get you something?”

“Uh, yeah. I could use some water.”

West snapped his fingers and pointed them at me like a pair of six-shooters. “You got it.”

He walked to his mini wet-bar across from the couch, where he sat and whistled while pouring a glass of water. He poured himself a glass of ginger ale and high-shelf Scotch over a few ice cubes.

For reasons I cannot comprehend I wondered if the good Col. had ever snorted cocaine in the back of a cab on his way to a Tijuana whorehouse, taken peyote, or ever passed out in a gutter. I attempted to imagine him—this man with precise hair, pressed military get-up, shiny teeth and happy-go-lucky “awe-shucks” disposition—in any “compromising” situation. I couldn’t, so I filed it into one of those “blind spots” of the imagination, like fathoming your own parents screwing. I’m certain he could never envision me putting a knife into an enemy combatant’s chest or repelling from a helicopter into a hot war-zone.

Like a radio transmission tuning in, a manic voice reverberated from a back room of my mind, a voice I thought I had heard before but could not remember from where: “Bikaver—Ron Reagan here. Do not forget, he’s the enemy, man—you’re in the lion’s den and don’t you forget it! He will try to mind-hump you!”

I pushed the thought aside, wondering where the hell it came from. Something someone had mentioned back in a cabin—about speaking inside my head in the voice of Ronald Reagan.

The Colonel handed me a glass of water and resumed his at-ease position behind his large oak desk. He straightened a small bust of Aristotle and blew some dust off the computer keyboard, then readjusted the placement of the small Samurai-sword sitting next to the monitor.

“Eddie, we have been developing unmanned air vehicles that will be able to take out an entire wedding-party via remote-control, and at a fraction of the cost. Foreign weddings are the enemy.” He sipped his Scotch and smirked. “I’m kidding, of course. The future is now. Imagine neutralization of enemy combatants without so much as costing one human life: we will do it electro-chemically. But….” he snapped his fingers “…delivery systems are the hitch, so we’ve tested different vectors with yo-yo results: intravenous injections, water-supply dosage, aerial spraying, bio-engineering it into the food—the human mechanism is one resilient unit.” Another small sip. “What acts as a pacifying agent in one person might cause another one to go berserk.” He polished off his drink, tipping his glass back to slide an ice cube into his mouth.

What was this pitch all about?

I couldn’t figure out how I’d gotten there, why I was there and for what reason I seemed to have landed right in the middle of this pitch on experimental drug weaponry systems by this strange self-styled “renaissance Colonel” of the United States Air Force.

But it wasn’t the first time I had “come to” completely confused, so I went with it.

He crunched on the ice cube and continued: “So the good Doctor Götzefalsch—brilliant mind, by the way—posited Fractalyn: a teensy-weensy robot-drug that goes through a person’s neuro-chemical network and wetware and maps it out in detail, then creates an exact and thorough multi-dimensional print of the genetic makeup of that person. From there we can create unique, personalized algorithms for how best to pacify that person … like a custom ‘mellow out program-code’ for any potential menace. Thus, any enemy combatants are rendered neutralized en toto and before ever becoming an enemy combatant. Simply put: we can read their blueprint, see that they are going to become bad guys and nip their ‘badness’ in the bud.”

I took a drink and a bit of the water seeped down the wrong pipe. I choked and coughed a bit. “Ahem…. Excuse me…. With all due respect—why are you telling me this?”

“Because you wanted to know.” He bit down on another cube.

“You’re telling me that I walked in here and demanded you tell me about experimental drug robots that turn people into programmed zombies and you just gave me the lowdown, just like that?”

“Yup. We made a bet, remember? You bet me that you would remember everything, and that you wouldn’t be affected—’hypnotized’ in your words—by the drug. You bragged about your ‘world class ability as a pro psychonaut to handle any substance.’ Hah. Do you consider yourself to be a programmed zombie at this moment in time?”

“No, I am a free-thinking individual who happens to be fighting you bastards.” I smiled, still not entirely sure he was one of the bastards, but at that moment in the timeline, I had more trust for the voice of Ronald Reagan than this guy.

The Colonel almost choked on his ice cube then smiled. “Son, you’re a pioneer, albeit a confused one. You are one of the original volunteers for this program.”

The static-like frequency buzzed into my ears and a quick flash of memory jolted me: an ad in the newspaper: “A-to-Z Research and Clinical Trials needs volunteers: Easy Buck$$$——Why Not?”

“You were a solid candidate: not a radical, but had a healthy distrust for authority…. A penchant for mildly subversive writing, a wild imagination, and you were flat-on-your-ass broke. You went for it. As the nano-drug insinuated in and mapped out your system, it found latent ‘intents’ of potential hostilities to the established status-quo, as well as early-on desires to become an astronaut, and that’s where the ‘Alternative Reality’ programs kicked in, and redirected you, or your waking-ego-consciousness, however you want to call the person named ‘Edward Bikaver’—to subvert a fictitious intergalactic cabal. The drug is working perfectly. You really are spaced out, man.”

“But I am hostile toward your plans. Everything you just told me about this frickin’ weird drug weapon is wrong and it’s something I would never endorse. As a matter of fact, I’m vowing at this moment to take a stand and oppose you assholes and all you represent.” Righteous indignation revved through me like a stock car. I’d never taken a stand like this before and it felt good. Vigor and adrenaline pumped through my veins and a clear purpose manifested: I had a visible enemy and a cause and it revitalized me.

The Colonel sighed and shook his glass, looking for any straggler ice cubes. “Again? Okay. Look, Eddie, baby—we’re on the same team. You’re hostile toward the….” He opened a manila envelope on his desk and pulled out of it a spiral notebook. He opened it and scanned through a few pages. “…Yes, the ‘New (and Improved) Interstellar Syndicate’—a cadre of space-alien finance oligarchs bent on controlling all stock shares of the known universe.” He slapped the notebook shut. “Pal, that’s the drug redirecting you to believe you’re doing something worthy, patriotic, and good, when in fact you are wrangling windmills. You see, project Don Quixote does that: it’ll steer potential rabble-rousers into a theatre of combat, which is totally fabricated. These ‘enemies’ are phantoms—they don’t exist outside the mind. Nobody gets hurt because it’s like a video game, but the spirit of the fight is still there. That is how to neutralize an enemy combatant: get them to continually feel he or she is ‘fighting the good fight,’ but is not actually causing any trouble. This way they won’t build any resentment toward us, their real nemesis, and they will be preoccupied fighting a non-existent battle. Imagine if the Visigoths, the Huns, the Vandals, all those menaces were busy battling ghosts inside their minds. We would all be speaking Latin right now…. With this defensive system, we won’t have the played-out traditional and generational blood feuds where people fight just because their great-grandpappies fought, etcetera. We’re taking the reality out of the enemy and allowing them to get their rocks off fighting virtual enemies…. Football and Soccer and video games and all those forms of bread and circuses throughout history were Fractalyn’s bush-league predecessors; this drug is much more effective and profitable. C’mon man, we’ve been through this baloney before. We’ve tried to get you de-progged, but the damn drug worked so well and you’re such a G-D’d hard-head that you still buy into all of it, and you’ll insist right now that this exchange is part of a PSYOP meant to distort and confuse you and that I am the enemy not to be trusted.”

“BULLSHIT,” I choked out.

The Colonel took a deep, bored breath, checked his watch and from behind the tint of his sunglasses I suspected he was rolling his eyes, as though he had been through this scenario a thousand times before and it had gotten stale nine-hundred-ninety-eight times ago.

To break what was to him the agonizing banality of the situation, he brandished a Swiss-army knife from his desk drawer and pulled out the tiny plastic toothpick from it.

“Okay. Have you ever actually engaged, seen or perceived any member of this ‘cabal’, and if so known with 100% certainty that they were a confirmed enemy?” He flicked something from his teeth. “No? Right. Because they don’t exist. Now enlighten me thus: if they did exist, why would this vast, well-organized, well-trained, intricate contingent of nefarious racketeers dedicate colossal amounts of time, personnel, technology and resources to keep one dead-broke hack named Eddie Bikaver on the ropes? That’s running an ongoing ‘reality’ production around one person without ever letting slip that it’s fabricated. Have you ever thought about the improbability of that? The amount of energy, coordination and manpower that would muster? What sounds more plausible: an army of actors playing a fake reality around you at all times or that you’ve been having adverse reactions with an experimental drug that alters your perception of reality, so much so that you regard the unreal, or irreal as real?”

I had no answer to the Colonel’s question.

His breakdown of the situation deflated the dash and vigor in me like a pin to a balloon. He rendered the notion of himself as the enemy and me fighting a vast conspiracy as a fanciful, absurd hallucination.

I was trapped.

He had framed the trap so I could either be considered insane or deluded by drugs. The fight had abandoned me, and a depressed fatigue moved over me like steel air. I wanted to go home and return to the simple life of crappy writing, drinking, and general rigmarole.

I just wanted to be with Mona.

From somewhere inside, that manic voice of Ronald Reagan I heard earlier urged me to hold on—but that voice soon vanished as though emanating from a cheap AM radio inside a truck that was driving off into the horizon.

The Colonel put the toothpick back into the pocketknife and returned the item to his desk.

I took another sip of my water and stared into the glass. “All right. What do I do?”

The Colonel took out some papers from the folder that had been on the desk and began filling out some paperwork. “Eddie, we need you to sign some further agreements and contracts reaffirming that you have knowingly taken part in this experiment, that you are aware you are having adverse effects to the drug because you lied when you told us you had never suffered concussions prior to this….” he looked up at me and raised his eyebrows, “…when you had in fact suffered multiple concussions throughout your life….” he resumed writing, “…and are allowing us to continue monitoring and treating you until you are deemed fit. Any and all notes or forms of writing you make are our property, and you agree to give us charge of any template personalities that manifested and continue to manifest while under our supervision. Plus other standard legal B.S., so we can pay you and continue your progress since you are still, well—involved. For your protection and ours.”

“My soul.”

“Naw, you can keep that.” He paused, looked up and asked either “What is today?” or “Where is Atoz Al Ways?” I couldn’t tell which. I passed the latter off as nonsense on my part, so assumed he had asked what day it was.

I was about to answer, but I realized I didn’t know. Not the day, month nor year. “I don’t know….”

He shrugged at my answer, then continued jotting stuff down. “Oh yeah, by the way–what is the status of your book? Where are you at?”

The walls in the office began to reverberate and my heart thumped fear. My throat dried up, my field of vision expanded and contracted and I had no frame of reference as to what time and space were—as though I were outside time and space and my body was a shell that I knew was there but didn’t feel part of. The entire office, now a series of layered geometric-fractals of shape-shifting colors and depth patterns, I intuited as being a ship or vehicle which resided in a dimension far beyond comprehension.

Is this a panic attack?

“No, you rube. The jackass has inadvertently said the code-question,” the Voice of Ronald Reagan re-asserted itself from the recesses of my mind.

The Colonel ceased writing and looked up at me. Above his sunglasses, smack-dab in the middle of his forehead manifested a glaring, impersonal blinking eye, searing into my mind.

I sat in frozen shock, a shit-eating grin plastered on my face.

Have I seen the eye of the enemy? Looks like it….

Time had suspended, or we had transferred into a different type of time-scenario, like in a dream. I tried to swallow but couldn’t … I could do nothing but listen to the beating of my own heart.

The Colonel spoke: “It’s okay…. Well, it’s not okay, but it’s okay….”

????

The room morphed back into the office as the Colonel’s third eye blinked and disappeared. He had perceived me perceiving him and his third eye and this new development changed his plans for me.

I was a caged mouse.

The sneaking suspicion hovered over me that I wasn’t going anywhere for a long time.

The Colonel filed the papers back into the folder and closed it. “Have you been withholding more things from us, Bikaver? Because if you have you could be causing yourself a lot of problems, and be held liable for non-disclosure punishment. We could put a lien on you.”

“Withholding—what?”

“Well, have you perceived things that you haven’t entered into any of your journals?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Like what?” Like that third eye? I thought, certain he was monitoring my mind.

He was, because as I thought it, he flinched a bit.

I had one card up my sleeve: he couldn’t verbalize what I was thinking, or else all my “delusions” would’ve been justified as real. If he had asked blatantly “have you seen a third eye on my forehead?” I would’ve known the jig was up. No, he had to try to coax me to tell him what was going on, which would have made me look obviously insane.

I’m not signing jack-shit for you, buddy. I’m not going to tell you that I know you’re reading my mind. And I definitely am not going to vocally tell you I’ve seen your third eye.

“Like what? You tell me,” he said.

“Would you mind doing me a favor?” I asked.

“Perhaps. What would that be?”

“Call yourself a motherfucker. And pay me. I think I won the bet.” I smiled.

So he called in a couple of orderlies and they punched a needle into my arm and injected me with a high dose of something that knocked me senseless.

“GET TO the mountain,” I heard in my head upon waking up in what seemed to be a hospital room.

In a foggy stupor, I staggered out into the bright hallway where a smiling nurse greeted me.

“Well, our sleeper has decided to join us!”

“Ahem umm—” I was unable to formulate a sentence.

“The doctor will be checking on you within the hour.” She led me out of the room, down the hall and into a larger room with chairs. A few other zombie-like “patients” walked about or sat drooling in a chair, their eyes glazed with an indifferent gaze upon nothing in particular. Another nurse sat behind a window dispensing pills to waiting patients.

The first nurse escorted me up to the window. “This is Mr. Bikaver. Looks like fifty of the Hal, a hundred other of the Thor.”

The plump, red-faced buxom lady with a florid shirt and red pants dispersed a few pills onto a tray along with a paper cup of water and set it on the counter.

“Okay, Mr. Bikaver, do you need help with these?”

I concentrated on grabbing the pills and the water, hoping to just fumble them into my mouth with a shot of water. I got the pills into the mouth and swallowed them.

“Open your mouth and stick out your tongue.”

I did as she requested.

She checked to make certain I hadn’t attempted to hide the pills under my tongue.

“Good job!” she said, as though I had accomplished something challenging. She had me sit down in one of the chairs. “We’ll just have you sit here quietly until we know the medication is doing its job. ‘Kay?”

Within a half-hour the pills came on: I became a pair of eyeballs caged inside a body made of slush. I could think, but not talk—whenever I tried my tongue fell out of my mouth and slow-motion baby-babble noises emitted from my throat.

“Baaaaaahl ohhhhhhhhv mmmmmaaaaavvv phhhhhhoooooo ddddooooooooaaaannnnnn….”

The nurse nodded her head, smiled and patted my hand. My tongue fell out of my mouth, and I watched it occur without the ability to stop it. All vocal-motor control was lost; I had but rudimentary control of my legs and arms.

“Aaaaahhhhmm gaaaaahhnnaaa gooooo tooooooo mmaaaahhhh rrrrrrr-oooooom noooooooowwwwww,” I drawled.

“Okay. Very good—you’re doing very well.” The nurse maintained her smile.

No I’m not lady, I thought. My tongue keeps falling out of my mouth, I can’t talk and I might shit my pants if I am not careful.

I moped back to my room and slumped down onto the bed. My tongue continued its drunken-lizard imitation.

THE DOCTOR came in and gave either a warm frown or a cold smile—I couldn’t tell which. Professional and nondescript, she put on her glasses, grabbed my chart and examined it.

“Mr. Bikaver, from Los Angeles. Your primary psychiatrist is Dr. S. Götzefalsch. Do you know where you are?” she asked.

I shook my head no.

“You’re in the M. Kultra Mental Care Facility in North Las Vegas, Nevada. I’m Dr. Jolyean. Do you remember how you got to here?”

I shook my head no.

“You were wandering around the premises of the Edwards Air Force Base, demanding to see Colonel West about a ‘private, top-secret’ matter, and ‘to settle the score on a bet’ you claim to have made with him. You were insistent, so the guards took you inside, called the Colonel, who met with you, then the Colonel called us because he said you were out of your mind. We had you sedated and brought to here. You do not recall any of this?”

I shook my head no. I didn’t even know how I had gotten to the state of Nevada.

“According to your record, you’ve been having relapses from the experimental drug you were testing in our affiliate facility in L.A., and you’ve been mixing alcohol and other drugs in with the experimental, which is bad news. It seems you arrived at the base in a black out. None of this rings any bells?”

This time I didn’t even shake my head. I just stared at her dumbly.

“It’s okay. For now, you should relax. I think today you should just stay in your room and take it easy.”

“Aaaaaahhhh woooooood yyliiiiike tooooo reeeeeed.”

“That’s good. You like to read. What would you like to read?”

“Kuuuuurt Vohnnnnnneghutt.”

“I don’t think Kurt Vonnegut would be appropriate right now in your current condition. Be right back.” She exited the room.

My tongue flapped out of my mouth. I strained to get it back in.

She returned and offered me a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

I slurred my thanks.

The next day they escorted me into a tiny, windowless room with a small table and two chairs across from each other. Dr. Jolyean was seated in one of the chairs, a stack of cards on the table before her.

“How are you today?” she asked, professional empathy in tow.

“Okay,” I mumbled, still groggy.

They hadn’t pumped as much thorazine and halidrol into me as of yet this morning, so I felt half alive.

She gestured for me to sit across from her, and asked, “Have you ever done the Rorschach before? I show you a card and you tell me the first thing you see in the pattern. Got it?”

I nodded.

She flipped over the first card.

“Jackson Pollock,” I said.

“I know it is just ink splotches, but you have to tell me what you see—like when you see a face in the clouds. Got it?”

I nodded again.

She flipped over the next card.

This one wasn’t “random splotches,” but a simple yet obvious blotter painting of a man in a lounge chair. The next was of a man and a woman in an embrace, and the one after that a mountain with giant angel hovering above it. They looked nothing like the first; these were actual representational pictures, not random splotches.

I sensed a set-up.

Though the drugs impaired my motor skills, the area of the brain responsible for calculations, estimations and basic survival still revved: if I answer what I see, they will write me off as a lunatic who perceives crazy things in these so-called splotches, but if I lie, they will say I’m totally delusional and cannot see the obvious pictures.

I chose the path of least resistance and called ‘em as I saw ‘em. After each answer, she jotted into her book and flipped over the next card. Her face maintained a perfect degree of expressionlessness. I was impressed by that.

The absurd Rorschach over, she took a casual demeanor. “Very well, Eddie. You’re doing fine. Now I am going to ask you a few simple questions … they are not literal questions that have a definite answer, but they are just to get impressions of your mind. Okay?”

“Uh-huh.”

She commenced, “What does the saying ‘people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones’ mean to you?”

“It means people who throw stones shouldn’t buy glass houses,” I slurred.

“That’s a logical answer,” she said. “How about ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss’?”

I muttered something about Mick Jagger and Keith Richards preferring sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. She either didn’t care for or didn’t understand the joke.

“What does the name ‘Atoz Al Ways’ mean to you?”

I shrugged. Nothing came to mind. What kind of question was that? A name means nothing to anyone unless they know a person of that name, or the name is iconic, or historically known, but this was a random name that sounded fake. Did these quack psychiatrists sit around, getting their kicks by making up strange tests that had no empirical validity?

A sudden flash of a hippie girl and her boyfriend handing me a pamphlet in front of a liquor store… Indeed, that was written on the booklet, but in the form “A to Z, Always.”

So what?

So I told the doctor the name meant nothing to me.

She continued, “What is the status of your book? Where are you at?”

For a flicker of a second, I thought she was asking about the book she had given me to read, but then my mind felt a tugging contraction and an oppressive presence ambled into my head. A sense of panic, like that in the Colonial’s office, flooded in and the walls began to reverberate and a third eye manifested upon her forehead.

Here we go again…

HER THIRD eye bore into my head and her presence was somehow “in my mind.” That’s the only way to explain it. I became paralyzed—transfixed on that confounded eye—as she searched the contents of my thoughts. My heart thumped hard and I couldn’t swallow. The “I” of my identity shrank into minisculity and irrelevance.

What is going on here?

She stared and answered telepathically, “The ‘you’ that is registered in the mind inhabited by you is a holographic simulation that we are studying and manipulating for scientific purposes. ‘You’ do not really exist, except as a fictional character in ‘your’ book.”

“Bullshit,” I wanted to say aloud, but my throat was too dry and I couldn’t force the words out of my mouth. I felt spellbound, trapped and fucked: a mouse in a cobra’s cage. None of my intellectual defenses came to mind, nothing to counter her with.

“You can come up with no defense to this situation because any thought you have has been entered into you via us. We input your thoughts and we delete them. You are just an interface—like a computer.”

Alas, a question: “Then what the hell do you want from me?”

The invasive mental pressure became more intense. She overwhelmed me with sheer, precise and cold psychic force, leaving my consciousness disoriented.

She scanned and I drooled.

In the back of my mind I perceived a vocal pinging: Ronald Reagan had planted a simple thought that I detected but intuited could not be discerned by this mind-intruding, three-eyed psychiatrist.

It was a thought-note in jumbled mutter-speak, yet I could decipher it: “You are being mind-screwed, therefore you exist. Play scared and dumb.”

I mustered up as much saliva in my mouth as possible and choked out, “I’m terrified.”

Her third eye blinked and disappeared. The room morphed back into a normal room, and my heart settled down.

“It’s okay. It’s not okay, but it’s okay,” she said. “We’re going to make sure you get the proper treatment.”

She stood up and opened the door. One of the orderlies came in and helped me stand up.

“It’s going to be a long road and lots of hard work, but we’ll get there,” she stated, as we walked out into the hall.

“You are never getting out of here,” I heard her say in my mind.

THE FOLLOWING is from a piece of notebook paper found wadded up in a garbage bin outside a Gas-N-Go truck stop, St. George, Utah. Handwriting matches that of Edward Bikaver, Jr.

Don’t know the date so will separate each entry with an “*” for each day since I’ve been here

…After Rorschach, some questions: glass houses, rolling stones, a strange name, and the location of my book…then that third eye!!!

I went small.

I vanished into a holographic reality, and she let me know I was screwed!!!

More drugs pumped in and the rest is like recalling a dream…

******

I think I’ve been here a week or so but I can’t quite remember. Lots of drugs. Mind is foggy, but I still write on this piece of notebook paper during moments of lucidity…

I keep hearing the words “zion” and “get to the mountain”. The voice is commanding but soothing. All I can answer back is the question, “huh?”

*******

They moved me to another part of the facility which is peopled with derelicts beyond Down’s…drooling and babbling like overgrown toddlers. Were they like this before they got here? Are we being turned into vegetables?

********

During “arts and crafts group time” I looked over across the room and there he was!!! Chuck “the Born Again Poet”—drooling, eyes empty and spirit cancelled. He sat hunched over, brushing watercolors onto a paper canvas… He looked at me, paused, then resumed painting. Did he recognize me? If he did, he wouldn’t or couldn’t acknowledge it.

During lunch a female got on the table and began to strip naked while doing a spaced-out dance. I recognized her: it was Lustra the sensual trance-dancer! Another one from the Moroni band! She was too busy getting accosted by the orderlies to remember me. I think we are all too hopped up on drugs to really interact with one another; she and Chuck seem to have been here a while so they have been really drugged up. Is that what is to become of me?

**********

The nurse orderly—nice lady, for the record—grabs me by the arm and leads me to a table where the others sit. “We need to find a project for you to work on.” I check the “make-your-own-moccasin-kit” and point to it. “Oh, yes that ought to be a good one for you to work on.” She is genuinely excited. I ask her how long I have to make it and she says each project usually takes 2 weeks of one-hour daily sessions. She left me to my job and 15 minutes later I had fashioned a pair of moccasins.

“Oh wow—you’re already done?” The nurse patted me on the head.

I think they were testing how much of my faculty was intact, because the next dosage of pills was much higher. They are trying to void me out. But they keep asking me about “My Book.” Do they mean my novel—Planet Fever? Why do they want to know about it so bad? It is not finished and it is not good.

Have I brought this entire scenario upon myself as a ruse to trick my mind into finishing the damn book?

I need to get out of here soon…

IN THE dayroom all the derelicts, including me, sat, our eyes fixed on the TV, our tongues dangled from our mouths, drool dribbled from chins. Looney Tunes cartoons played at a low volume.

Daffy Duck charged onto the screen in full swashbuckling garb, thrust his sword and the backdrop suddenly disappeared. Daffy asked the animator to return the scene, then walked off the screen….

I knew I had to get out of that place.

“Damn right you’ve got to get the hell out of there! They are sheep-dipping you.” Ronald Reagan’s voice echoed from somewhere in my brain.

“Whaaat?”

“They’re mind-humping you, man. Digging deep….”

“Can they keep me here legally?….”

Daffy attempted to reason with the animator, but was erased, then redrawn as a guitar-playing cowboy. He tried to play the guitar but got no sound.

“Legally or not, they ARE keeping you here, BUBBA! If someone comes to check on your condition to see if you’re ‘fit’ to be released back into the wild, these swines are gonna pump a time-released adrenal-psychotropic into your blood…. When you’re in front of a board or judge the dastardly drug will go off and POW! You’ll go crazy like a G-D Mandril that just had his balls electrocuted and hurled his own shit into a gallery of astonished onlookers…. The judge’ll stamp ‘DO WHAT YOU WANT WITH THIS MANIAC’ on your file and that’ll be that….”

“Why are they doing this?”

Daffy demanded some new scenery, and the animator fashioned a trivial, colorless line-art background. Daffy asked for color, and was himself painted an array of random colors. “Not me, you slop artist!” Daffy yelled. The animator erased his body and re-illustrated him as a flower-headed, weird amalgamated creature, a flag on his tail with the word “screwball” emblazoned upon it.

“Because THEY KNOW that YOU KNOW the score. Even through the fog of psychological warfare you have seen the EYE OF THE ENEMY, and they don’t like it! They think you’re more than just a dupe or rube now: these bastards think you are a high-value enemy target, of utmost importance, and a potential menace and threat to them. That’s why they are hacking your brain.”

“What does that mean? I can barely control my bowels, so there’s no way in hell I can pose a threat or escape. Why do they want to know about my crappy novel so much?”

“Because, man—it holds the key. They want it, or they want you to finish it and hand it over, or they want you to cede the rights to it so they can finish it. That’s the brass tacks and I don’t even know exactly what the score is there. The Honcho hasn’t told me. As for your escape: when you trilocated through space back at my cabin you also stumbled into alt-time, and we pre-viewed this very scenario fold out. We dosed you with a special adrenaline/serotonin booster that can be triggered only when you think of what we call a ‘code prayer’.”

“What honcho? What the hell is the code prayer?”

Daffy had been rendered as a sailor, and as he began to sing “The Song of the Marines,” an ocean background was drawn behind him and he fell into the water.

“Oh, you’ll meet him. Great guy. The ‘code prayer’ is a combination of words we figured you would never use until you need it.”

“What are you waiting for?! Tell me the damn prayer.”

“Not yet. If you think it right now, you’ll end up running around like a berserker. We must wait until the right opportunity arises. It is only for escape purposes. DO NOT ENGAGE THE ENEMY. Then, get your ass to the mountain in the desert. Good luck, man.”

“What mountain in what desert?”

No answer.

Daffy flew around in an airplane, the animator drew a mountain in his path. The plane crashed off screen, Daffy and the windshield still in flight. Daffy “bailed” out and ripped open the parachute, which became an anvil. He crashed to the ground and in a stupor hammered away on the anvil, reciting “The Village Blacksmith.” The anvil animated into an artillery shell, exploding on the next hammer strike, and Daffy finally snapped, insisting the animator reveal himself. The animator drew a door before Daffy and closed it on him. The camera pulled back: Bugs Bunny sat at a drawing table, and asked, we, the audience, “Ain’t I a stinker?”

Everyone in the room smiled. We liked cartoons.

THE FOLLOWING is from a piece of notebook paper found pinned up on a “tourist info” wall at the Hurricane City Center, Hurricane, Utah. Handwriting matches that of Edward Bikaver, Jr.

***************

The sensual artist I once knew as “Lustra Love-Joy” approached while I was trying to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in the dayroom. She was out of it, but she offered me a wide-brimmed straw hat and a little ruck-sack she had been fashioning (from a kit) for who knows how long. Was this some sort of code? Who knows. I took the items and thanked her. She began to dance again and was promptly sedated.

****************

Mona. She stopped to pay me a visit. How did she know I was here? Maybe Dr. Götzefalsch. She seemed sad. She just doodled with pencil in a notepad. I couldn’t really interact with her because of the fog of the pills. I wanted to tell her many things, like how I really liked her, but my tongue kept falling out of my mouth and all that came out were baby sounds. She looked like she was trying not to cry. She brought me a pair of sweatpants and a hoodie.

“Taaaaaaaaank yooooooooo,” was all I could say before she left.

******************

At 6 am yesterday morning, parched from the pills, I got up and went to the water fountain down the hall. The place was quiet, until I overheard in her office around the corner the doctor talking to another doctor about me. I also heard the words “permanent” and “resident” and “wing.”

“I am doomed,” I thought…

Oh, the brilliant timing of Chuck the “Born Again” Poet: he had decided to hijack the commons area for an impromptu, masterful and very loud poetry recital, this one including props: a fire extinguisher.

“FIRE!” he yelled the first line of his poem.

“TCHCHCHCHCH-CHCH-CHCHCHCHT” bellowed the extinguisher.

“MAN!” he yelled the next line, and again the “TCH-CHCHCHCH-CHCHCHT” of the extinguisher.

“EXTINGUISH!” he yelled.

“Sweet Jesus get me out of this Donkey Kong,” I muttered, and felt the release of the adrenaline/serotonin emergency dose. That was the secret “code prayer.”

Two front-desk nurses along with the doctors and the security orderly ran over to what had become a bonafide commotion: Chuck’s “poetry recital.” The morning food-delivery crew was wheeling in the breakfast carts, leaving the front doors wide open. My room nearby—I grabbed my hoodie, the small backpack and the straw hat and strolled out of there. Casual.

This seemed to be a wing to a larger facility, like a hospital. I got into an elevator and smiled at a few exhausted ER specialists. They stopped off at the third floor and a few other people got on. I surmised that the facility I was in was large and compartmentalized; nobody paid attention to me on the elevator + the guy at the security desk didn’t look up from his newspaper when I walked by.

Outside the sun peeked up and I could see my breath… I had on grey sweats, grey hoodie and my moccasins so I started jogging through the town. I jogged out into the Las Vegas rush hour. Las Vegas in the early AM seemed like any other town: a bunch of bleary-eyed people in traffic going to some miscellaneous shit job – something I had been attempting to avoid doing in life so far. But at what cost?….

My sanity, perhaps.

Or were all these drones idling in their cars the insane ones? Who knows. No time to think about that.

I jogged up to a cab parked in a lot of a two-bit hotel/casino and asked where the Greyhound station was. He pointed me in the direction and in five minutes I was there. I checked for any cash, and noticed I had a stack of twenties. I wondered where that had come from then guessed Mona had slipped it into my wallet. I bought a ticket to Denver and got on the bus. I figured on the way to Denver I could figure out how to get back to Fillono’s utopia in the Rockies.

THE BUS eased by the town of Mesquite, the last in Nevada on Interstate 15, and toward the Arizona border. Arizona offered a mild test for the engine of the bus, for Arizona welcomed us with a steady and winding grade of pavement straight into the Virgin River Canyon. I stared out the window at those towering cliffs of golden orange as the sunlight cut the rocks, carving the landscape into hard angular shadows. The adrenaline from my “escape” had worn off, and now a narco-haze washed over me in waves. My mind felt like a yo-yo dipping from clear to unfocused thoughts—up and down, up and down.

Scenery passed by, the drone of the motor chugged and the driver kept up-and-down-shifting as the bus negotiated through the steep snaking canyon. What seemed to be white-noise static ambience, I came to realize, pervaded from within my own mind, and soon the voice of a female, who sounded like the quack Dr. Jolyean back at the hospital I’d just fled, cracked through: “Please return to the facility immediately—” the transmission cut out.

Another voice—Ronald Reagan’s—cut-in: “Do not listen to any further transmissions notifying you to return—”

That one cut out, and Jolyean cut back in: “Please return to the facility. You are in danger. Your mind has been co-opted—”

Cut.

Reagan’s voice again: “They’re attempting to track you via the nano-bot drugs they gave you. Drink plenty of water and piss frequently—”

Cut.

Jolyean’s voice again: “Do not drink any more fluids as this may cause dangerous withdrawals to your medication….”

“St. George! Utah’s ‘Dixie’ folks!” the driver notified over the loudspeaker.

The bus pulled into the gravel lot of the small Greyhound station and stopped. He informed us we had fifteen minutes to “take care of any business.” I scouted a “Utah State Liquor Store” a block away, and walked to it.

St. George: the poor, dusty town that received the brunt of the Yucca Valley nuke fallout during the testing days back in the 50s…. An Andy Griffith feel with a cheap and rusty, dusty overlay.

I paid the worn-leathered man $3.95 for the pint of mid-shelf vodka, put it in my pack and walked toward a convenience store by the tiny bus station. I passed a guy in a three-pieced suit talking on a pay phone. Yes—this guy had been sitting toward the front of the bus and I could’ve sworn he kept looking back at me during the ride, but I tacked that thought up to drug-induced paranoia.

“…the bus to Denver. Yes, I am on it….” he said as I walked by. He took notice of my presence and turned inward toward the pay phone.

No, I wasn’t paranoid.

I walked into the Circle-K convenience store and bought a turkey and mayo sandwich, a gallon of water and a role of duct-tape. I paid for the items, chugged half the water on the spot, then put everything in the backpack.

Outside, the guy was still on the phone. I queued up a few feet away, jingling some change in my hand.

He took note of my presence. “Yeah, somebody needs to use the phone, honey. I’ll call you when I get to Denver. Love you. Bye.” He hung up and walked toward the store, nodding at me with a polite smile.

Smooth operator, you are.

I grabbed the phone and put a few coins in. When I saw that the guy had entered the store, I hung up and trotted toward the bus. I boarded, walked to my seat in the back, brandished the duct-tape from my pack and took the straw hat off my head and taped it to the front of the backrest. I walked down the aisle toward the front of the bus and looked back: from there it looked like someone wearing the straw hat was sitting in my seat, perhaps looking down in reading or dozing off. Good enough. I notified the driver that I was going to stay here in “Utah’s Dixie” and thanked him.

The door of the bus faced the convenience store, and I could see that the guy in the three-piece was still inside the store, his back to the window, waiting in line to use the restroom. I got off the bus and walked around to the other side, then trotted off down a road that headed away from the Interstate, the view of me from the convenience store shielded by the bus.

About five minutes later the sound of the bus leaving emitted from off in the distance. I was a good quarter mile away and didn’t see anyone wearing a suit trailing me.

My ruse had worked.

I WALKED eastward, alongside the two-lane highway called “Telegraph St.” and enjoyed the constant hum of the adjacent power line overhead. Sandy, dry bluffs flanked one or the other side of the road, and the occasional dry gully let me know this was a barren area.

The red, orange and yellow mesas loomed about like a huge ancient mythic castle, a vast desert wilderness.

Something was drawing me toward there.

Again, a firm yet non-intrusive voice whispered: to the mountain.

I am officially cracking up, I thought. “What mountain?!” I yelled.

A crow caw was the only response.

I passed a sign that read “ZION NATIONAL PARK 30 MILES” and a jolt of electrified thought blasted forth into my consciousness: the name “Atoz Al Ways,” the farcical Colonel West and the diabolical Dr. Jolyean had asked if that name meant anything to me. Tucked away in a secluded recess of my mind the answer pulsed: yes, the name did mean something, and I was not supposed to let them know that.

One tumbler to the lock of my awareness had fallen, a piece of information that was my duty to keep secret. An intuition arose: I was on a clandestine mission, I was an operative, and they were attempting to hack into my mind to get whatever information was being stowed away within my cranium.

Another crow, or perhaps the same one, cawed.

“No, you are paranoid, delusional and following the diversionary tactics an experimental drug has prompted in your mind. You’re walking to your doom.” The cursed Air Force Colonel’s voice now accompanied me through the thought-static.

Perhaps I was walking to my doom, but at least this version of it would be faced outside with the sun-lit splendor of raw and awe-igniting nature, and not inside the florescent chamber of horrors known as the psychiatric institution.

“Fuck off!” I yelled, and the echo may or may not have caused the same, or perhaps another crow to caw.

MY SHADOW before me grew longer as the sun behind me hovered its slow farewell for the day. I’d been walking for a while when I finally came across a sign: Hurricane City Limits, Population 3,915, Elevation 3,240.

Welcoming the weary traveler was a Dairy Queen on the left side of the road and a Phillip’s 66 gas station on the other. This road merged with the Main Street, that resided just west of a long hilly mesa and hosted rows of quaint, one-story brick houses encompassed by chain-link fenced-in yards, and a few white brick building businesses cluttered around the center of town.

A small sign for “Pioneer Park” caught my eye, so I reckoned it’d be a good place to stop for a bit and collect my bearings. I walked a few blocks north to the small park and sat on the early-spring grass and stretched out, eating my sandwich and gazing up to the sky. The clouds floated along the darkening blue horizon as the “golden hour” ushered in the photographer’s dream light.

I finished the sandwich, drank a little more water, closed my eyes and eased into sleep.

A scratchy voice on a loudspeaker gave a departure time and last boarding call for passengers. I was inside an old central train station, except the trains were spaceships going off to the moon.

Faceless men in head-to-toe black paramilitary garb and mean-looking dogs strutted about, scoping for any “suspicious persons.” I peered over to a security desk as a ninnying, high-pitched animated woman yapped at the security guard, pointing out someone sitting at a bench. The poor fool sitting at the bench had no clue he was a topic of interest. He sat smiling and sipping from his boxed juice: a man with Down’s syndrome; an overgrown child waiting and excited to get on a ship and go to the moon.

“I don’t like the way he’s smiling,” the ninnying bitch barked, and the frequency of her tinned-voice bit my ears like an ankle-nipping Chihuahua. “Why is he by his self? What is he drinking out of that box? I feel uncomfortable with him here, and I would feel very uncomfortable if he were to be on the same shuttle as me….”

The faceless person behind the counter nodded and implied “we’ll take care of it.”

I checked out the unsuspecting, childlike, about-to-be-fucked-with dude: he smiled, sipped, and awaited the magic of space flight.

Two stern thugs, their faces hidden by mirrored face-masks on their helmets, approached him, a small robotic trashcan trailing behind. He looked up at them and smiled, and offered them his boxed drink. A leather-clad hand nabbed the juice box from him and squeezed the contents into the mobile robotic receptacle. The poor guy kept smiling in a childish “innocent-playground-no-danger-here” way, and the thugs grabbed him and stood him up. He offered them his ticket and got giddy with excitement, thinking this was “spaceship time.”

He kept smiling, I couldn’t believe he kept smiling….

They tossed the ticket into the robot and escorted him to an ominous iron door and he smiled the entire time and sang, “Gonna ride the ship to space” in his own makeshift melody which kept reverberating throughout the station until the hard, echoing clang of the door cut-out his words.

He was gone and somehow I got the idea that they were going to exterminate him.

I began weeping, and sensed attention had been drawn my way … but I couldn’t control the weeping.

The ninnying bitch was back at the security desk.

“I feel uncomfortable….” She pointed at me.

I bowed my head and wept into my hands.

Through my fingers, I spotted a pair of two black military boots entering my field of vision. I looked up and witnessed the two paramilitary guys towering above. My reflection in their masks stared back at me; I appeared to be smiling, though I knew I was weeping.

Something else was amiss: I had Down’s syndrome.

I thought about fleeing but instead offered my ticket. They threw it into the robot receptacle and escorted me toward the ominous iron door.

“You’re going to exterminate me!” I attempted to yell, but all that came out was “Gonna ride the ship to space!”

The door clanged and the air got really cold….

“HEY MISTER, you might want to get up and indoors. At night it’s cold here.” A stringy, brown-haired girl loomed overhead.

The park had grown quiet and dark. From the shadowy parking lot, a young man emerged. “Eliza! What’d you find over there?”

“Some guy sleepin’ in the park. He doesn’t look like he’s from here,” she said over her shoulder, then looked back at me. “Am I right?”

“Yeah,” I said, pulling myself up.

The guy approached and stood next to the girl. He had a James Dean look but with late-teen acne, and she was pretty in a plain-Jane, naive way with giant, Boston Terrier puppy eyes. She wore a flannel shirt and a prairie skirt over jeans and military-style boots, topped off with a leather jacket.

“Hey man. How’s it going?” the guy asked.

“I was taking a break here, and I must’ve passed out,” I said.

“You drunk?” he asked.

I thought about the bottle I had bought back in St. George. I hadn’t cracked it open yet. “No, just tired. I walked here from St. George.”

“That’s a decent hike. ‘Specially in those things.” He pointed to my homemade moccasins. “‘Bout seven hours, huh? Where you going?” he asked.

The girl just stared at me as though I were a rock star or a creature that had just fallen from the sky.

“Zion.”

They looked at one another. “He can’t walk to Zion tonight. It’s freezing and he’s got no gear,” she said.

“Yeah.” He sniffed the air, closed his eyes, nodded, and opened his eyes. “Okay then. You want, you can stay with Eliza and me at my mom’s house. She’s out of town on business, but she wouldn’t mind anyway.”

The girl—Eliza—whispered something to him. He nodded. “Yeah, okay then. And we’ll give you a ride if you want to Zion. Tomorrow.” Eliza’s brown eyes lit up and she clapped and jumped up and down like an excited puppy. “We haven’t been there in a while and it might be nice to do a picnic.”

I couldn’t get over the fact that they were offering a complete stranger a place to crash. Were these people so naive as to allow a vagabond sleeping in the local park into their house? Looked that way. Or maybe I was a fool for going off with them? What if they were some weird couple into freaky stuff like finding random, out-of-town strangers and snuffing them for kicks? I figured I was a decent judge of character, and these two did not strike me as menacing. If anything, they were kind of simple.

Of course, most of Ted Bundy’s victims might’ve assumed the same thing prior to accepting his advances….

Still, the idea appealed to me, because the temperature had dropped considerably. “Sure. That sounds good. Thanks,” I said, and the guy helped me up.

He looked at me, raising his dark eyebrows. “One stipulation, though. No booze and no drugs. Can’t have it in my vehicle or house. Period.”

Oh shit.

That was the catch. I hadn’t had anything to drink since … when? The mountains of Colorado? Or was it before my visit to Fillono? When was that, anyway?

“Oh. Then maybe I should get rid of the bottle I have in my pack.”

“You do what you think is right,” he said.

Maybe I should pass on this offer….

I was at a crossroads, answering to the devil on one shoulder and angel on the other. A metaphysical “Let’s Make a Deal”—the moment of truth.

Could I do it?

Sure.

Did I want to do it? Spend one sober night with this strange pair?

Fuck it.

I uncapped the bottle, poured it out onto the dry turf and tossed it into a trashcan. I felt a mild pressure—ever so subtle—release from my brain, like a stuffed-up nose finally becoming clear.

Eliza beamed.

The guy nodded, then gestured for me to follow him.

We walked to an old 1970s International Scout, a pre-SUV beast of a vehicle meant to drive through hell and high water, so long as you could keep the 7-mpg thing fed with fuel. Eliza and the guy climbed in and I got in the backseat. The giant metal doors slammed shut and I realized those were the doors that had made their way into the dream—the sound of the iron doors slamming behind me and the poor Down’s Syndrome guy with the juice box. I wondered about the meaning of that dream, just as the behemoth engine rocketed to life, cutting off any meditation I was entertaining.

“Your driver here is the love of my life: JD Martin,” the girl shouted over the engine, looking back at me over the giant couch of a front seat.

“And this here is Dawn Eliza Jonathan, the love of my life,” he shouted, and she bent over and kissed him on the cheek.

“That’s right. See, he got me a ring from the Safeway bubble-gum machine.” She showed off her green, plastic smiley-faced ring.

I nodded, still unable to lock in an accurate read on them.

“I’m gonna get her a nice diamond once I get my limousine business up-n-running,” JD said.

I wondered if there was a great demand for limousines in the town of Hurricane, Utah.

“Well, you’ll probably have the market cornered in this town,” I stated.

It took a moment before they both laughed. The vehicle veered off into the dirt and the ride got rough for a few seconds until JD steered back onto the road.

“That’s a good one, mister. A limousine service in Herahkun. Whoa boy—I never even thought about that. You got an imagination!” He wiped a tear from his eye.

“He’s gonna start a service in Los Angeles that takes people from their homes or hotels to big events. When I turn eighteen in August we’re cuttin’ loose from Herahkun,” she said.

I liked the way both of them pronounced Hurricane: Her-ah-kun. Gave me a down-home feeling that I was going to be okay under their care. Sober, or otherwise.

“And Eliza here is gonna be a makeup artist. Get them actors and actresses to look nice for the big screen.” He put his arm around her and drew her close.

Such optimism and naiveté. I recalled my own youthful sense of buoyancy, and wondered when it had metastasized into a shell of perpetual indifference and chronic cynicism. Probably at seventeen when I broke my leg and received a concussion falling after climbing up the side of a building as a drunk stunt and dashed any and all hope for induction into the Air Force Academy and spaceflight, which I had been gunning for.

So I took to booze and writing.

Exit: good cheer. Enter: sardonicism.

“Where you from?” Eliza asked.

“I’m from where you two are going.”

“No shit?! L.A.? How ‘bout that. What in the hell are you doing all the way out here in our fine neck of the woods, anyway?” JD asked.

Long story…

JD MARTIN’S mom’s house was a one-story brick deal with an add-on garage and chain-link fence surrounding the modest, grass-thatched yard. He drove the truck up the gravel driveway to the back of the place. A couple of Australian shepherds raced toward us, wagging, barking and smiling. One of them jumped up on me, its tongue slapped my face with slobber.

“Trumpet, get off him,” JD commanded. Trumpet paid no attention to his command. Another swish of the tongue. “She really likes you. She never does that to anybody … especially strangers. TRUMPET, I SAID GET DOWN!” This time Trumpet obeyed, but stayed by my side.

“See? We ain’t crazy. We got a good gauge of people and these dogs sense it. I know you were thinking we were out of our minds ‘cuz who would let a stranger into their home? You passed the test,” Eliza said. Trumpet licked my hand.

We entered through the back door into a tiny laundry room that led into a tidy basic kitchen that joined a little dining room with a small, well-kept table. The living room was situated on the other side of a threshold of hanging beads.

In that living room, a giant, black-velvet painting of what looked to be the Pinta, Niña and Santa Maria in a harbor adorned an entire wall. On another wall hung a picture of wild stallions galloping in an old-west landscape; next to it a case of books on miscellaneous topics like self-help, new-age, pulp novels, and a set of Funk and Wagnal’s encyclopedia that stopped at SA—SP. The rug was made from a fake furry animal of some kind (sloth, perhaps?).

A brief cursory scan of the place revealed random plants, a chrome-framed glass coffee table with Popular Mechanics, Cosmopolitan and National Geographic magazines dispersed about, and there was a disco ball suspended from the ceiling. A couch on one end of the room faced a giant hutch with a hi-fi stereo set that looked like a spaceship console from the 70s. Over in a corner by the front door rested a pair of ski boots, skis and one pole. On the shelf next to the spaceship console there were stacks of old records: Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Jethro Tull, Best of Mel Torme, The Who, and Johnny Cash…. The most interesting ornament was the crash-test dummy seated and leaning against the bookshelf. The place posited itself as an amalgamation of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s with a style and consistency to kitsch.

This was a thrift store transplanted to a living room, but with better, softer lighting and no musty smell.

“Peek-a-boo! Howareyou?” A high-pitched voice squawked from the corner opposite the disco ball. Perched atop a coat rack stood a bright-green parrot. “I see you. Don’t get fooled again,” the bird whistled.

“That’s Parakleet. You can call him Pal for short. He’s an Indian Ringnecked Parrot,” Eliza said.

“Peek-a-booo! Nice to meet you!” Parakleet, or Pal pitched.

“You bet. Nice to meet you too, Pal,” I said.

“I bet! I’m your pal! Peek-a-booo!” Pal trilled.

Reacting to my double take, JD said, “Yeah, Parakleet is real special. That’s one smart bird. He’s got a vocabulary over a thousand words—which is twice more than most—and he understands.”

“That name….” I wondered.

Eliza smiled. “Obviously rhymes with ‘parakeet’, but it’s also a Greek word for advocate, and he advocates, all right.”

“Get comfortable. We’ll get you out of your bind. You can count on it. I’m your pal. Peek-a-booo!” tootled the astonishing bird.

“Yeah, his prior owner was a litigation attorney, so he sometimes sounds like one of those commercials,” JD said, then pointed to a beanbag on the floor. “Definitely get relaxed.”

I checked the big, yellow beanbag chair and sank down onto it.

JD walked over to the stereo and put on a record, some kind of spacey, rhythmic synthesizer music mixed with syncopated whale calls.

“Would you like something to drink? We got some great herbal tea JD’s mom brought back from Korea last time she was there,” Eliza offered.

“Sure.”

She walked through the beaded curtain and the clacking sound triggered a momentary flashback to my childhood: our basement had been a quasi-disco hippie lounge with dance floor, hi-fi, and … disco ball. An eclectic mishmash of strange cultural combinations.

“Peek-a-booo!” Pal blasted.

JD leaned over the side of the couch and snapped on a device that shot up multi-colored lights at the disco ball and made it twirl—we had the exact same thing in our basement. He dialed the twirl speed to “low.”

“I appreciate your hospitality. This is a … funky place.”

“I got a funky mom. She’s a product of the 60s, 70s and 80s. She stepped off the bus in 1988, and I don’t think she owns one thing from after that year.”

“But this place is sooo cool,” Eliza said, walking back through the beads. “It’s original.”

“Yeah, original,” I muttered, scoping around the room for more treasures.

She handed me a mug with a picture of a gorilla on the side and set the other two mugs onto the glass coffee table.

“That was fast.” I watched the steam rising up from the mug.

JD and Eliza exchanged glances.

“We already had water simmering before we left. That’s how you gotta make this tea,” JD assured me.

“It’s a slow simmer,” Eliza offered.

“The client must be informed of everything that’s going on!” chirped Pal.

Eliza lighted a stick of incense. Whale calls and distant tribal drums issued forth from the speakers.

It was clear: I was in for a weird night.

A LUKEWARM wave of relaxation and calmness poured over me as I sipped the tea, listened to the music and zoned out. The tribal-whale songs put me at ease. The colored lights revolved around the room and my mind began to wander off into imagination turf….

I felt like I was sitting inside a funky spaceship, cruising through inter-dimensional space … an oceanic habitat teeming with space-whales. I imagined the bird Pal as the ship’s artificial intelligence interface, chirping random data when he thought it was needed. Thoughts could be transmitted with ease and speaking vocally was unnecessary in this floating ship.

“…the client must be informed of everything that’s going on….” I heard in my mind, or did I? Did Pal say it, or did I think it? Or did I think I heard it?

“Of course. We don’t want to freak him out.” Eliza’s voice entered my mind.

I glanced over at the couple lounging on the couch—JD leaning back with his arms behind his head and Eliza skimming through a Cosmo magazine.

“Did you just say something?” I asked.

They both shook their heads.

I must be losing it—again, I thought.

I sipped more tea. The incense had permeated the room and altered my perception: through my nostrils I perceived a differing dimensionality about the space I inhabited, as though we were underwater—yet breathing, sitting, and drinking tea as normal. I was floating down a river in outer space underwater—that’s the best and only way to explain it…. I needed to break the trance, so I peeled myself out of the beanbag chair.

“I need to use the restroom,” I announced.

“Down the hall on the right,” either Eliza—or JD—or both in unison said.

I placed the tea down on the table and slogged my way to the bathroom. I flipped on the light, turned on the faucet and splashed cold water over my face.

“Do you think he’s ready?” Eliza’s voice was still inside my head.

“Sure—the Honcho says he is. He can hear us right now. Might as well.” JD’s voice was also within my mind.

I took a piss and listened for them to speak again. Butterflies filled my chest as an impending sense of exhilaration overtook me.

Something was about to happen.

I returned to the living room and JD sat on the couch flipping through an issue of Mad magazine, Eliza gazed at the spinning disco ball. I dropped back into the beanbag and rested my arms behind my head.

“It might be easier if you close your eyes….” the voice of JD suggested from within my head.

I looked over at him. He read—or pretended to read—the magazine. He glanced up at me and gave a nod, as though asking me “how’s it going?”

“Otherwise you’ll get transdimensional interference,” said the voice of Eliza, still somewhere inside my brain.

“Your five senses are ‘tuned into’ a specific reality frequency. We’re currently breaking into it and operating from another one—but the more your regular senses operate, the harder—”

“What the hell is going on here?” I blurted out.

JD and Eliza seemed startled.

JD shrugged his shoulders. Eliza just stared at me with her big puppy-dog eyes. The parrot squawked.

Had I gone mad? Was I having withdrawals from the pills? Or was this young couple fucking with me? A blackening smog of paranoia began to rise….

“He’s slipping.” JD’s voice.

“You’re fine. You’re not having withdrawals. You’re not paranoid. Or going mad,” Eliza’s voice comforted.

I closed my eyes and felt a fluttering tugging at the outer edges of my eyelids, as though my brain’s upper part had been caught on a fishhook and was being reeled in. The tugging became more pronounced and I felt like some force was pulling me out of my own body. My eyes were closed, yet an awareness of alternative space encompassed me….

“WHERE IS he? I think he’s doing all right. Not quite ready for the full data-dump. We gotta ease him in casually…. Full disclosure at the mountain. He’s our Pal.” The voices of JD, Eliza and Pal meshed together. “It’s a little tricky to explain in concepts you can comprehend…. I-we will reveal more after you clear your mind out in the desert…. Don’t panic, this is only a test…. Don’t worry about a thing, I-we have got your back … You just gotta relax right now and trust me/us. My-our name is Atoz Al Ways and I-we am-are the designer, developer, producer, and architect of the thing you call ‘reality.’ At this moment, you are outside your known reality habitat, in more ways than one. I-we cannot explain what I-we mean at this very moment—your brain would explode, and I-we wish to avoid that from occurring. Tomorrow my-our helpers/proxy liaisons JD and Eliza will drive you to the desert and tell you where you need to go from there. That’s it for now—your natural senses are overriding this signal….”

My eyes shot open and I peered around the room.

Same scenario: JD and Eliza on the couch. Only JD was clipping his fingernails and Eliza was knitting. Pal let out a loud whistle.

“How you feeling? Looks like you zoned out there for a bit.” JD collected his nail clippings and placed them in an ashtray on the table.

“The tea’ll do that to you. Very relaxing.” Eliza continued knitting.

I almost said something, but refrained.

“Peek-a-boo!” Pal squawked.

I watched the colored lights revolve around the room. The whale music continued and that is how I fell asleep.

I WOKE up to the smell of pancakes, bacon and coffee. The first early streaks of dawn jabbed through the blinds. JD was attaching a sleeping bag to my backpack with bungee cables.

“You’re gonna need this if you’re planning to stay out there at night,” he said. “Try these on, we look about the same size.” He tossed a pair of hiking boots onto the floor. I put them on and walked around the room.

“Yeah, they fit. Thanks.”

“No sweat bro. There’s a towel for you in the bathroom. Hit the shower then we’ll grub and bolt.”

“Okay,” I said, and made my way to the shower.

In the bathroom, I checked myself in the mirror. I had slept the whole night through and felt rested. My mind was like an old radio that had been in the repair shop and was now firing up. No static transmissions, just the humming glow of a comfortable tone. I checked for random voices, like that of the doctor, or my hosts, or good ol’ Ron the Gipper. Nothing so far. Radio silence. It seemed the heavy narcotics had cleared out of my system and I was gaining my mind back.

At least, I hoped so.

“You still have to get out of range,” a mild voice stated.

Shit—the voices were still active, but I didn’t feel menaced from this one; it was rather a matter-of-fact vibe on the soothing side. The same one that had directed me to go to “the mountain.”

Atoz, I discerned.

“Mmmm-hmmmm.”

I took a warm shower and brushed my teeth. When I got out into the dining room a plate with a pile of pancakes, bacon and coffee awaited me.

Eliza beamed. “Enjoy. And thank you for getting us out to Zion for the day. If it weren’t for you, we’d have never thought about going.”

“Oh. Yeah, you bet. Thank you for your hospitality.”

THE LIGHT layer of frost gave the environs around Hurricane a golden-white hue in the early morning light. The Scout International ambled up the quiet, two-lane freeway; the dogs lolled their tongues and checked out the windows from the back. They radiated unabashed excitement.

My mind and the sky shared a common trait that fine morning: both seemed fairly clear. I wondered about the last time my mind was “clear” of booze, of uppers, of pharmaceuticals, of experimentals, of deliriants…. That I couldn’t recall.

As we approached the entrance of Zion National Park, to the left passed endless reddish vertical mesas and to the right a series of pointy, ragged mountains. We stopped at the park ranger booth and the ranger noted the valid park sticker on JD’s windshield and waved us through. On the right, signs pointed to a maze of user-friendly campsites. JD drove the other way. He wanted to go “where not a lot of tourists venture.” About a mile in he turned left onto a smaller, one-lane dirt road.

“This is ‘Zion Canyon Scenic Drive.’ It’ll take us a ways in—a couple of hours. Then you can go hike to wherever you want from there.”

He was taking us into the heart of Zion.

The two-hour drive up the road was slow, bumpy and scenic. At some of the steeper inclines Eliza and the dogs got out of the vehicle: Eliza to direct JD around giant shards of rocks and holes strewn about the road—which was more a trail than road. The final ascent was a two-hundred-yard slope so steep that all I saw out of the windshield was blue sky and clouds; I thought we might flip over backwards.

“I love this shit!” JD continuously repeated.

Over the final crest the vehicle leveled off, revealing a panorama of mountainous desert.

We were atop a mesa overlooking an entire city of otherworldly red and brown castle wall mesas, splotched with green vegetation at their bases. This went on as far as I could see, and I had trouble believing it wasn’t all a splendid painting. Far below us a winding river coursed its way through the canyon, tiny specs of faraway cars making their ways on the road alongside it.

“This is it,” said Eliza.

“It certainly is,” I said.

The dogs ran around and chased one another as JD got out a blanket, a cooler and my backpack.

We sat and ate some grapes and trail-mix and allowed the breeze and the birds and the resounding quiet to be our entertainment.

So it went for quite a while….

After a bit, J.D. spoke: “Which way you thinking about going?”

I scanned the landscape of endless mesas and canyons. I shrugged. I still wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing in Utah, and more specifically inside Mt. Zion National Park. But having been compelled to come this far led me to believe I would be pointed in the right direction. Or perish, lost in the middle of the Utah wilderness.

“If you look that way, to the north of us, you see that big towering rock over there. It’s called ‘North Guardian Angel.’ It’s a view all right, and it’s right where the canyons border the more foresty mountain area. I think if you start now, you could get to the base by evening, camp out, then climb up it tomorrow. That’s what I’d recommend.”

“Sounds good. Thanks for looking out for me. I really appreciate it.”

This was it. Time to go.

They each gave me a hug and Trumpet licked my face. Eliza grabbed a bag from her pack and handed it to me.

“It’s a homemade granola whatchamacallit.”

JD took a couple liter bottles of water from his cooler and put them into my backpack. He zipped it up and patted it.

I thanked them again, said “so long” and began my trek downward on a little hiking trail.

I WANDERED down the trail into the canyon area which was edged by shrubbery, desert trees, and whizzing insects. The sun gained momentum into the sky and started sucking the sweat out of my body.

I reeked. The last of the pharmaceuticals was flooding out of my skin and the smell was toxic and metallic. When stopping to take a break I noticed my hand trembling: I had the shakes … not as bad as a hangover after a week long vodka binge but enough to let me know that I was detoxifying hard. I didn’t want to sit around for long because my mind would begin to go into a panic-like paranoia: What if withdrawing from the drugs cold-turkey gives me a heart attack and I die out here? My heart’s beating too hard…. Maybe I should’ve stayed at that infernal hospital…. This was a complete mistake…. Why am I doing this? I’m totally insane….”

Yet, a still, quiet voice prompted: “move on.”

So I moved on.

By dusk, I had sweat out quite a bit of the garbage in my system and arrived at the base of a large mesa/mountain that I presumed to be the “North Guardian Angel” that JD had spoken of. He was dead on target: it was a solid place to camp out for the night. I’d get some rest, then in the morning ascend the mountain. I laid out the sleeping bag and set down my pack, then gathered a bunch of dry twigs and little branches to fashion a small fire. I sat and ate some of the homemade granola, staring at the flames until it was time to sleep.

I woke up to the tweet of a bird. It had a distinct pattern and cadence of the first bird I remember hearing from childhood that had resided in the field behind our duplex. Two slow whistles rising in pitch (G and A) followed by three successive, rapid whistles jumbled in F, octave lower F, and C.

The other awakening, natural sounds of nature filled the air as the sun rose. I ate another handful of granola, sipped some water, packed up the bag and cleaned up the spot.

I began my ascent.

The first part of the climb went easy. A narrow trail wound up the side of the rocky mesa hemmed at times by close-cropped canyon walls. Things got tricky about two-thirds of the way up, which was mid-afternoon by the time I got that far—and it got steep. At times I crouched on all fours and climbed up, making sure every piece of stone I grabbed or stepped on supported my weight; if it didn’t, I would lose my footing and slide backwards a bit—which happened multiple times. The fragrances of the natural were overwhelmed by the unholy funk of big-pharma synthetic sweat. I couldn’t quite place that smell: chalky, pilly, metallic, unsettling, unnatural. How much more of this stuff did I still need to sweat out?

Climbing about and up the mesa sparked another childhood memory: a movie I had loved as a five-year-old kid: Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The poster had been mesmerizing to my young and imaginative mind—a cluster of bright stars in a night sky above a two-lane road illuminated by a mysterious glow off in the distance of a barren and dark landscape. I often wondered where that road was going to. What was there?

“Can we go there, Daddy?”

My pops thought I meant to the film. “Yes, we’ll go next week.”

The next week we went to the film. Of course I loved it, particularly the parts with the little boy and his toys going haywire and the crazy man making a mountain out of mashed potatoes.

“Can we go to there?” I asked my dad again as we exited the movie, pointing to the film poster—that holy and strange place in my mind on that poster.

He said it was very far away, but some day we would go.

As an aside: I was baffled why that exact shot from that poster wasn’t actually in the movie. But that movie had seeded the desire in me to quest outer space. From that moment forward I had been focused and disciplined and knew I was going to become an astronaut when I grew up.

Then it happened: one drunk night, in high school—my first drunk night ever—I decided to play show-off in front of a group of people, particularly Heather Halloway, and display my climbing savvy.

The way up the side of the four-story building was a piece of cake, the bricks protruded randomly and out enough to grab and find good footing. The way down got tricky: I was cocky and certain the warm lips of Heather Halloway awaited me, her climbing champion. Midway my descent, in the midst of imagining the rest of my passionate and epic night with her, I realized neither my hands nor feet were in contact with the wall of the building. As a matter of fact, things were getting really breezy and when I looked back I had enough time to think, “there is the sidewalk approaching fast. I am falling—” followed by a surge of white electricity and a heavy cracking sound. I woke up, a concerned mom and dad hovering above me in a hospital.

Goodbye, astronaut. Hello, drunk.

The climb up the face of “The North Guardian Angel” grew more dangerous; it became the type of ascent professional climbers and aficionados scaled. Not some mental-ward-escaping, detoxing, hack writer on a quest of dubious possibilities.

Fuck it—I’ll master this thing with only my hands and legs, no ropes for me.

I had nothing to lose. I wasn’t afraid of the challenge. Perhaps that thinking was a mistake. Or maybe not. Maybe all of this was going according to plan: this was the way things were supposed to happen. But who’s plan?

Maybe had I gone into the Air Force and done all that astronaut stuff, I would’ve been funneled into a narrowed and compartmentalized reality, never having stumbled into this alleged mission to take down a nefarious entity and their plan for universal domination.

Yes—that road on that Close Encounters poster led me not into the literal ship that went to outer space, but to the proverbial light: the awareness that the aliens walk among us, and the bastards were pulling a big fast one.

Reminiscing about all this, particularly my first crush of Heather Halloway, prompted me to think about Mona. Lovely Mona. I really liked her. Was she really worried about me? My guess: she had finally had enough and said to herself, “I don’t think I can handle anymore of this nut job. I am out of here.” I would have understood if, when I got back (if I ever got back), she were long-gone from my circus. When I was around I was crazy, and when I wasn’t she was worried about me because I was crazy. What kind of relationship is that? What kind of guy does that to a woman? Why was I such an ass? Obviously I hoped she would still be around, but what the hell did she see in me in the first place?

Then the thoughts drifted to Moroni. That chimera of a man still fit into my story in some important fashion, but how?

I took a break from scrambling up the side of the giant rock and rested inside a hollowed-out portion, like a mini-cave overlooking the vast desert landscape. I fancied myself a weird monk, surveying the off-colored spectrum of the Universe’s colossal reality. I had ascended quite a way and I hoped the other side offered an easier descent because doubts were arising about making it down the same way without a rope….

There was a steep pitch yet to make before what seemed an easy path to the summit.

A tree to the right of me about twenty yards had grown outward from the cliff, sideways. What other way could it have grown? I appreciated, if not related to, its tenacity to find its own direction to grow in. For a second, the thought about climbing out onto the branches occurred in me, just for the challenge. I decided against it.

Why had I really climbed up that building back in my youth, and why was I climbing up this mountain now? As a youngster, climbing was one of my fortes and I would scale up anything: six-foot-high brown wooden fences prevalent in suburbia, lampposts, walls with protruding bricks, up to the roof of our two-story house….

The adrenaline rush. The challenge. The perspective.

In sixth grade, I climbed the rope in gym class faster than anyone in the history of that elementary school, but my name didn’t go up on the “record board” the resident gym teacher—Charlie “Chicken-Bones”—had put up in honor of the kid that had all the records from ten years prior. His name was “Don Deluzio,” and for a long time I had thought it was Dom Deluise, the chubby actor made famous from his absurd sidekick roles alongside Burt Reynolds.

Wow, Dom Deluise used to be quite the athlete. My pals busted up laughing; they thought I was joking.

In reality, this infamous Athletic King of Little Elementary had become a big-shot freshman linebacker for the Colorado Buffaloes college football team when I was in sixth grade.

Why hadn’t my name gone up on that board?

According to Charlie “Chicken-Bones,” my climb wasn’t “officially” made during a “sanctioned” event. When the hell were these “official” events? I wondered.

I shrugged, knowing that I had just beaten the reigning champ, and nobody besides me, Charlie “Chicken-Bones,” and my friend Doug Chiccone (who was very outraged by this injustice) would ever know.

The game was rigged in Don’s favor. This became very obvious when I crushed his time in the 40 yard dash, twice—and a shocked and bemused Charlie “Chicken-Bones” examined his stop-watch, looked up at me, looked back down at his stop-watch, then stated “too bad this wasn’t a sanctioned event—you would have broken the record.”

That time I got it: Charlie “Chicken-Bones” was the high priest meant to maintain the altar of Don Deluzio and keep his hallowed records intact. Off-the-record, I had beaten his times. But I was destined to be only the clandestine usurper. No one was to know.

A few years later—entering his college senior year—Don and a buddy had gotten “hit-n-runned” by a drunk driver while summer vacationing the South Padre islands in Texas. Don had broken his jaw and leg, which healed in time for the fall football season, but then he slipped and tweaked his knee on the turf during a practice.

I had no animosity for him, rather I felt for the dude: he had no part in Charlie’s obsession with him. I deduced that Charlie “Chicken-Bones” had made a deal with Mephistopheles to keep Don’s records up on the board, and now Mephisto was coming to extract payment from the poor and unknowing Don Deluzio.

I imagined Charlie weeping under that shoddy record-board hanging above the gymnasium entrance of my former elementary school, cursing the gods that his star elementary athlete’s NFL hopes had all but been thwarted when Don graduated college to become a damn fine tile salesman. Charlie’s dreams of having fostered a professional football player who had gotten his athletic start in his elementary gym class were dashed.

That was it.

I was destined to be a behind-the-scenes type operator—the unknown champion.

I got it early: cynics get birthed when they figure out they are getting a raw deal by lame-ass gate-keeping puppet masters who run a strange show that has their own interests at heart, jerking off to their own puppets.

Fuck Charlie “Chicken-Bones”….

I continued upward and sideways, pausing to survey the best possible route to take. I found myself on what had appeared from below to be an easy angle, but was pretty much stuck on a steep face—not quite vertical but closer to it than I had reckoned.

“Shit.”

The heat of the afternoon sun, paired with my newfound predicament, caused a profuse sweating of my hands, which made climbing much more treacherous. Every time I got a decent footing I’d let go one hand to wipe the sweat off with my shirt, grab hold again and wipe off the other. For every step: one foot, one hand, one grip at a time.

I imagined what I must’ve looked like from below: a lunatic without equipment up very high on the side of a very steep cliff.

Keep it simple, stupid … the classic Mark Twain maxim on storytelling I applied to this impromptu freestyle cliff scaling.

I’d have to go up and over to my left and around a slight corner, to the horizontal tree, above which access to the summit was. Step-by-step, I shinnied diagonally up a slight fissure in the rock to get to that tree, telling myself it’d be “smooth sailing” once that point was reached. So I hoped….

A COUPLE of hawks flew around calling to one another, “Check out the dumb-ass climbing up this cliff….”

I inched my way along, sweating, cursing and swearing if I got to that summit I’d be a better man.

“Who are you swearing this to?” a calm voice asked.

“You,” I blurted out.

The sun blazed down on me, creating a blanket of heat that kept getting hotter.

“Whoever you are,” I added.

Across my field of vision, which was now spotted and sun-blinded, the name “Atoz Al Ways” scrolled.

“Thanks. I still have no idea who you are.”

The calls of the hawks began to enmesh with the sound of the stillness of the desert atmosphere and a low, pulsing hum reverberated around me. I was either tripping from heat stroke, having a peyote flashback, or both.

The rocks became malleable, rubbery, and easy to grip. Patterns outlining the precise course I needed to scale the rocks appeared, showing a clear pathway across. The angle no longer felt steep (though I was aware of the dangerous grade)—my mind and body had “tuned” into the terrain. I became one with the mountain. It all became second nature, and I thought that’s what it must be like for a mountain goat.

“Do not get over-confident,” the calm voice warned.

“Okay.”

With acrobatic ease, I scrambled to the horizontal tree. Standing at its roots, I thought the tree had it right: it was growing in the proper direction—the rest of the world was off-kilter. This horizontal tree was a marker, a checkpoint notifying the climber “you are almost there, buddy.”

Looking up the mountain, the angle was easy for the rest of the way, and the rocks made a natural stairway to the top. A stairway to heaven.

It took about ten more minutes to get to the summit. At the top, a cool breeze caught the layer of damp grit encasing me, cooling me down. I did a few slow, panoramic pirouettes to view the entire landscape around me. The continuous blue and white sky hovered majestically above layered rocks of gray, orange and yellow giant jagged towers, stretching forth into the horizon.

“Oh yeah!”

I removed my knapsack and sat down on a flat rock. Never had I experienced such a stillness before—neither outside my body nor within my own head. I was at ease.

The sun started to hit that angle in the sky that makes its impending set known: a late afternoon sweet light that says you don’t need to rush, but it might be a good idea to think how you’re to go about your evening. I figured I’d camp out right there near the top—in a natural cove of rock (to shield off the desert wind).

I walked around and gathered pieces of dried wood and shrubbery scattered around, then built a fire, drank some water and snacked on the rest of Eliza’s homemade granola. The blue sky turned to orange, orange to gold then gold to purple as the sun set, and the stars began to poke into the massive dome of the sky.

OFF IN the distance a bunch of hyenas laughed as the stars speckled across the darkened sky—every single one in the Milky Way Galaxy, it seemed.

“Hi there,” a voice from no distinct direction said.

I couldn’t tell if it was from within my own head, or a fellow climber. I jerked my head over my shoulder, scoping the area.

“I am speaking from both within and outside your head, just in case you were wondering.” The voice was calm but authoritative. The same voice I had heard earlier while I was scaling the cliff. The same one that intermittently had told me to “go to the mountain.”

A few more hyenas made mockery of something else in the night.

“I’m glad you didn’t say ‘a few more hyenas made mockery of the night’ as you were thinking of doing. It’s more subtle that you have them mocking something else in the night, rather than mocking the night itself. Nice job in not forcing the poetry.”

“Um—thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

In no rush to advance this conversation with my invisible visitor who claimed to be both outside and inside me, I stared off at the night sky some more. A few shooting stars streaked across, inducing a sense of comfort. The existence of my new companion wasn’t bothering me, and for some reason I felt as though we were well acquainted. It was casual. I’d encountered some strange shit along the journey; this wasn’t anything new.

The galaxy around us made its slow swirl and time passed with hyenas and light-breeze accompaniment. As I stared above, a yet deeper calm prevailed through me, and the stars ramped up their spinning in a time-lapse fashion, transforming into a circular swarm of light, quickly gaining speed, as though vertigo was being induced. The hyena laughter bended into an undulating, fast and rhythmic chorus of strange music that grew faster and faster. The desert breeze morphed into a roaring river of sound. Though everything around moved at an incomprehensible pace, I remained still and my mind serene, absent of panic and fear.

Then it happened: what could only be described as a giant thunderclap or cannon-shot reverberated through the air, and then an upside-down man bounced into my field of vision, then bounced out. He bounced back in, then out, in then out, in, out, and finally—in.

I was face-to-upside-down-face with a guy wearing dark sunglasses. He seemed to be suspended from something above via bungee cord strapped to his feet. The spinning and roaring had stopped.

“Howdy Eddie. How’s tricks?” he asked.

“Um—–”

“You may not remember me. As a matter of fact, I guarantee you don’t remember me, so I’ll just get down to the brass-tacks: I’m Atoz Al Ways. I’m your author and employer. I understand you need some help with some things.”

“Um—–”

“Well, I’m here to help you finish.”

“Uh—–”

“Your novel.”

“Oh.”

“PRETTY WILD, huh?”

“Uhhh huhhhh….”

“This thing called ‘reality’—I wrote it. I designed it.”

Atoz Al Ways’ bouncing settled and he hung before me. Still upside down. I looked up to see what he was suspended from, figuring a hot-air balloon. Nothing but black sky. What happened to all the stars?

“I have you in a suspended animation right now. You are neither here nor there. You are outside space and time. And for what it’s worth, I am not the one who is upside-down. You are. Like I said, pretty wild, eh?”

I looked down, and sure enough my feet were on nothing. I was surrounded by utter nothingness. But I wasn’t worried or terrified, more intrigued.

“Yup, you certainly are intrigued. All of this will be in your novel. This very conversation, verbatim. And it will serve a purpose, believe it or not.”

I cleared my throat. “Purpose?”

Atoz smiled. “You are going to save reality. And free thought and free will. The reality I had authored has been plagiarized and rendered quite lame because of my former associate’s designs. He and his league of hacks have purloined and turned my work into a circus of sleazery, wretchedness and confusion. He’s trying to get into your head, to steer the story, hence, the Universe, in a bad direction. You are going to get things ‘back on track.’ That’s what this is—a little informal meeting. I have employed you to do just that. Of your own free will, of course….

‘Huh?’ is what comes next—by you, of course—and then you ask:”

I did say “Huh?” Then: “Am I having some sort of withdrawal symptoms from those crazy experimental pills I’ve been taking?” he and I said, in unison.

“Now I will tell you that they gave you those pills because they are scoping your mind, to see if you have ever come into contact with me. Do you not remember….”

Though I didn’t need to, I closed my eyes and recalled previous instances when I was asked the question whether or not I had ever heard the name ‘Atoz Al Ways’: by the psychiatrist with the third eye and the Colonel … and Moroni.

“Yup. That is correct. They are all in league with a former associate of mine—a malcontent named Phos Atomos Paradosi. They’ve been manufacturing false, or misleading narratives in your head in order to confuse, diffuse, reuse and suffuse you with their agenda, which is shady and dangerous, and not a good deal for you and your human brethren, nor is it a good deal for your fellow mammals, the dolphins, or distant life-form cousins the trees, or really anything within the oxygen/carbon dioxide cycle of existence. The only critter that might benefit from their plan would be the cockroach, and possibly the naked mole rat, depending on what sort of spray paint they use to turn the sky red.

“Digressions aside: Since Phos and his cohorts are not playing fair, I’m popping in as a reminder to help you along. You see, they want to eliminate free will, but they cannot do it so long as it exists even as a concept in the mind. So they’re attempting to move the very concept out of existence, at least within the sphere of your minds. But it still exists in your mind, and it exists within your work-in-progress, or rather, your novel, Planet Fever.”

Again with the damn novel.

I hadn’t finished it and didn’t know if I wanted to. Hell, I didn’t even know what the damn thing was about, or where it was going. That novel was a microcosm for my mind: a complete mess.

“Balderdash!!!” The surrounding atmosphere—if that is what you want to call it—ignited like lightening as his voice thundered. His eyes illuminated through the tint of his sunglasses. “The thing is around. Buried. Dig around for it. And remember: if you give it up, there goes all free will in your known Universe.”

I shivered and glanced around for a way out of the predicament, but I was stuck in that utter nothingness with the suspended upside-down (or right-side up, depending on your perspective), sunglass-wearing, all-knowing, mind-reading being called Atoz.

“‘Why me?’ you ask. ‘Because I felt like it,’ I retort. Stop asking these inane questions and get to it. You have a story to finish, and a universe to save. Capiche?”

“Uh—”

And within the blink of an eye he was gone, and I was back by my little campfire.

“What in God’s name was that?”

A pack of hyenas laughed for a good minute or two. At me, I conjectured.

THE FIRE diminished and the hot coals of wood breathed their orange-black undulations and emitted the occasional spark into the (again) starry night. This was accompanied by more laughter of those hyenas that found many goings-on of the night hilarious.

What was the point of everything? What had Atoz meant by saying I had a universe to save? Saving “The Universe” seemed like a very tall order, not something a man like myself was prepared to take on.

Coming to no solid conclusion, I dozed off hearing Atoz’s voice repeating on a feedback loop in my brain: You have a story to finish, and a universe to save.

The sun came up the next day and I decided to stay right there, on the peaceful mountaintop. I didn’t bother digging through the dirt to search for my novel. Why would it be on the mountain anyway? That made zero sense. As a matter of fact, I thought I had finally and utterly lost all touch with reality.

“That’s it,” I said to no one in particular. “I’m done. Out of ideas. Out of sanity. Out of order. Someone else will have to save the universe.” I laughed at that last part because saying it aloud sounded ridiculous. I waited for the hyenas to join in, but got nothing but a resounding silence. “Don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Don’t know where to go, what to say, what to think, so I’m staying right here, dammit.” I added the “dammit” for effect, and it seemed to work because a gust of wind whipped through me, causing me to tremble and wish I had a heavier jacket. That was the last thing I recall saying aloud for quite some time.

After my declaration and the gale force wind, I experienced the final repercussions of withdrawal as the narcotics evaporated from my system. An onset of delirium took over and by day three I had run out of food and water, leaving me dehydrated and starving. I was dry as a lizard. My skin was red-hot. I had officially integrated with the desert.

One night (how many nights had I spent out there? I didn’t know), I found myself spread out on my back, naked, staring at the sky and wishing an alien vessel would cruise by and nab me. What would they be like? Hostile? Hospitable? Indifferent? Most of outer space itself was hostile to humans by its very nature: a cold, airless, soundless expanse of nothingness. Empty oblivion between stars, debris, and planets. And our tiny little blue orb: a mere afterthought on the outskirts of a galaxy spinning around a universe of millions or billions of other spinning galaxies. Our planet was simply a compartment on a giant spaceship called “The Milky Way” that was ambling along the Universe, hurtling through the cosmos. And we were its tiny passengers in this planetary compartment aboard the vast ship. In a sense we were aboard a UFO within a UFO, except we weren’t “unidentified”—we were very much identified. We were individuals capable of free will and thought.

And now—allegedly—forces within the great galactic ship wished to catalogue and enslave the cargo and rip away the things that made us most human….

If true: how was I supposed to stop that from happening—with a book?

You betcha.

“MR. BIKAVER, I appreciate the exposition and flights of fancy you are sharing with me about this account. It is very fascinating and entertaining. But I must insist you ‘cut to the chase’. Did this ‘Atoz Al Ways’ character, or ‘author’ give you anything besides the anecdotal information you mentioned in your account?”

The Interrogator has grown impatient with the story. Perhaps he doesn’t think it’s leading anywhere. I don’t blame him.

“I eventually stumbled upon a bunch of dossiers. Buried in the dirt.”

“A bunch of dossiers?”

“Yes. In manila envelopes. I am guessing he left them there for me.”

The Interrogator ponders this for a bit.

I break the silence: “Yeah. I think he was trying to help jump-start me back into my novel. You know the one—Planet Fever.”

NOTE: The following is what was found in a manila envelope:

REALITY AUTHOR/DESIGNER (RAD) DEFINED: Atoz Al Ways became bored with the standard “automating reality rendering machines;” his goal was to populate his Designer Multiverse with other little designers, authors and renderers like himself, who would be free to design as they wished, themselves being unique individual creations. So he set up a program whereby certain characters would be selected and put through what he calls “Hell Life” to see if they “got what it takes”(which he was quoted as saying in a “60 Millenia” interview while puffing a cigar). Once they sign on, they are placed through a grueling reality: their memories are wiped clean and they are dropped into a random scenario whereby they have no clue what is going on. The only criteria for pass or fail: in the end, do they trust that their honcho knows what he is doing and hang on? Or do they say, “fuck it, this ain’t worth it” and go some other way, and washout?

“Trust is the foundation for any relationship, and any company worth its grain of salt is founded on trust.” …I trust them to invent realities. Do they trust me, though? That is the question.

Atoz’ early RAD (Reality Author/Designer), who happened to be a non-human, was a great disappointment. This subject failed to trust Atoz’ plan to induct human beings into the RAD Program. Who was this disappointing RAD, now turned RADiCal (Reality Author/Designer in Calamity)? Phos Atomos Paradosi, an old buddy and business associate of Atoz. Phos set up and is currently heading the N(aI)IS, which is gobbling-up all the assets of the Universe at a stunning rate.

NOTE: The key to any RAD-in-training is his “Book of Life”—if he signs away the rights to it, or allows anyone to requisition it, or coerce him into changing it, then he is washed out. Each RAD-in-training titles his own “Book of Life” whatever he wants to.

NOTE: The following is what was found in a manila envelope:

MY EYES opened and I was camped out by the side of some remote dirt road. I vaguely recalled having climbed down the mountain and wandering to here. I looked and saw the “North Guardian Angel,” that strange mountain I had been camped atop, was about a mile away. How many nights had I spent up there? When had I staggered to this spot? How had I staggered to this spot? Why was I naked?

The hyenas stopped laughing. I yawned a waking yawn. A morning breeze stoked the coals of a smoldering fire I must have fashioned the night prior.

I stared off toward the mountain I had just conquered. Though fatigue, hunger and bewilderment taunted me, any fear or apathy which might have resided within me had vanished.

A bird whistled, precisely like the one from my childhood: two slow whistles rising in pitch (G, A), followed by three successive, rapid whistles jumbled in F, octave lower F, and C. Suddenly my mind’s eye was seized by a streaming torrent of seemingly ancient symbols, but three dimensional and holographic in nature. The architecture, the logic, the programming code, the schematic, the story of the cosmos made perfect sense as a winding yet simple, elegant equation; this information poured into me as a steady data-stream of what appeared to be ancient pictographic computer code language. It hit my mind fast and concise. My eyes shuddered as I absorbed this fleeting comprehension with awe. How would I remember all this information? How would I even relate it to anyone if I could remember it? I knew I wouldn’t. How could I? It seemed untranslatable….

“Don’t worry about the details. Do you trust me?” Atoz Al Ways’ voice asked.

I laughed loudly like the hyenas: a mad, astonished, knowing foolish laughter. I laughed so hard I doubled over and rolled around on the ground. I stopped laughing when the edge of some hard box dug into my shoulder blade.

A book.

A Book of Life.

My Book of Life….

The distant roar of a motor hit my ears: someone was heading my way. I jumped up, grabbed the dirt-encrusted book with the visible words “My Book of Life” on the cover, and tossed it into my backpack. I found my dusty clothes in there so I put them on and waited, listening to the engine’s approach.

A golden gleam of metal came forth in a wake of dust, ripping down the dirt road. The vehicle pulled into my camping area fast and skidded to a halt. As the dust settled, a golden Z-28 Camaro with dark-tinted windows appeared. The driver revved the monster engine up a few times before turning the car off. The door opened and the heel of a cowboy boot crunched into the gravel. Another cowboy boot emerged and hit the dirt. Standing in those boots was a grinning, head-shaking Ezekiel Buckminster.

“Man, you’re one wily cat to track down.” He dabbled some snuff between his thumb and forefinger and snorted.

The parched lips on my red-hot face cracked as I smiled. Some crust fell from my bottom lip.

EZ approached me, still shaking his head and now whistling in astonishment. “What the Sam Hill are you doing out here in the desert? You on some kind of vision quest or something? Shit.”

He patted me off and handed me a canteen. The water washed down my throat like a flash flood through a parched river basin. He grabbed my backpack, slung it around his shoulder, took my arm and walked me to the Camaro. He opened the passenger door, tossed the backpack inside, and I got in. The plush interior of the sports-car bucket seat felt like a nice soft hug from a favorite aunt. EZ got in, fired up the engine, and through well-engineered German speakers, Johnny Cash’s “Ghost Rider’s In The Sky” blared. EZ peeled out, spun a 180 degree turn (still peeling out) and gassed it to about 75 mph on the narrow dirt road … calm and nonchalant as an old pro.

EZ JAMMED the car up onto the Interstate and we motored due east—the late afternoon sun began its slow descent in the rearview.

“Wow. I feel clean.”

EZ chuckled.

“My mind feels clean. Clear.”

“You’re probably delirious, my friend. Heat stroke and lack of food and water’ll do that to a man.”

“I’m detoxed. Got all those poisons out of my system. No pills, no booze, no shitty food, no shitty water.”

“Sounds like you are officially rebooted, my friend.”

The motor droned and the Mars-like landscape of Utah blurred by. I checked my watch—the same one EZ handed me back at Whynot, Fillono’s Rocky Mountain utopia retreat.

A thought clicked into my mind: this watch is how EZ tracked me down….

“This thing certainly has some range.”

EZ pshawed. “Naw, man. I had to make some modifications to the homer. I rigged a portable one with amplified range and hooked it to the battery of this car, but right now it only has about a 100-mile radius, though I got something in the pipeline with far greater range, just need a secondary tracker.”

He slowed the car down and we passed by a Utah State Patrol speed-gunning the passing cars on the freeway.

“I checked your channel after you vamoosed, to see what the hell happened to you that night. Some commando dude in military get-up pulled a snatch-n-grab on you. Plugged you with a syringe while you were chilling out then put some harness on you, right there on the deck. Then up. Out of our camera range.”

“Last thing I remember was talking to Fillono on the deck, then finding myself in an Air Force Colonel’s office…. He made it seem like everything prior was an elaborate hallucination—as though me being at Fillono’s was a complete fabrication of my mind conjured up by some experimental drug I had been taking.”

EZ kept the vehicle at a steady eighty. “They got you guinea-pigged good.”

I remembered the Colonel saying my mind, via the direction and machinations of the drug, was manufacturing scenarios and invisible enemies and rendering them as quite real. Was EZ one of them?

“They must’ve had a chopper hovering above, just waiting to carry me off.” I was baiting EZ.

“No dice. Everybody in the place and their grandmas would’ve heard a chopper. You know how quiet that place is. A chopper would’ve made an apocalyptic racket. Naw man, they nabbed you in a vehicle dark, quiet and tip-top secret. I’m betting one of those triangle jobs you see on those UFO shows. Whatever it was, it was shadowy and silent, because none of the cams picked it up. Just a cloudy shape was the best I could make out. I reckoned any cat that gets snatched by commandos and spirited away in some clandestine aircraft has got to have something going on worth smokin’ out. So I reckoned I’d be the one doing the smoking. After checking the footage, I checked your last known tracker ping and it was headed south by southwest. That’s when I thought they were scooting you back to around Vegas—Area 51 Air Force Base. I know they got secretive shit going on there. You sayyou recall chatting with Fillono, then being in an office of some military brass?”

“Yup. He repelled in after Fillono left—we’d been having espressos out on the deck—I was just watching the sun go down. Next thing I knew, there he was, on the deck, babbling about the pronunciation of the word ‘inalienable’, then I was in his office—on some base, and you were right—outside Las Vegas. It was West. Colonel West.”

The radar detector on the Camaro’s dash beeped and he again slowed the vehicle down, signaled and got behind a tractor-trailer rig. An SUV with Massachusetts tags whizzed by to our left.

“Colonel West? Shit.” EZ was deep in thought.

“Yeah.”

“You are certain of this piece of data?”

“Yeah. I am pretty sure I met him once before.”

EZ checked the rearview and chuckled. A Utah State Trooper—lights and sirens—blew by us.

“That’s bad news. I think I’m starting to get the narrative here.”

“Yeah. Me too. West is definitely working with a handler mind-technician quack who goes by the name of Dr. Götzefalsch—I think that’s who introduced me to West. And he is either using or working with Fillono. I think West is trying to implement a mind-control system planet-wide. He knows I know the score, so he is trying to neutralize me, and trace me back to Moroni, who may or may not have been working with him, and if he was, he went AWOL.”

“Shit,” EZ said.

We passed by the SUV, which had gotten pulled over. The driver was pleading with the trooper, who was writing a ticket.

“I think you’re on point. But I got a hunch you are being, or have been, sheep-dipped for something else, too.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means you’ve been given an alternate identity for some kind of furtive shit. They dip the sheep to get rid of all the crap on it. Figuratively, it’s getting rid of details of your life so you are not known to be an operative. Usually nasty business. Lee Oswald was sheep-dipped and he knew it. Why do you think he claimed he was a patsy? Now I suspect they can do it so the person being dipped can’t remember it happening. Makes it real hard to blow your cover if you don’t even think there is a cover to be blown.”

EZ’s spiel seemed plausible.

I wondered about Fillono. I am certain EZ mulled over him as well as he punched the gas and we cruised eastward into the approaching night.

AT 11:05 p.m. MST, EZ pulled the car into the gravel parking lot of the Vagabond Inn in the town of Grand Junction, Colorado—a small city just east of the Utah border.

The two-bed room was rustic and the dark-brown fuzz carpeting threadbare; a painting of an 1800s wagon train in a mesa-ridden landscape—the centerpiece of the wall behind the TV—“tied” the room together. A small table by the heavy-curtained window, a desk with lamp between the beds, and a small shower, toilet and sink in the back rounded out the orangish-brown-hued el cheapo motel room.

“You hit the shower, I’m gonna head to the convenience store next door and nab some goods,” EZ said.

The water hit my crunchy, dusty skin and ran down my body like a mudslide. Amazing how much dirt had gotten onto me—the water hitting the drain was brown throughout most of the shower. I soaped off twice for good measure. I finalized my half-hour hose-down by letting the water hit the back of my neck for a few minutes. I exited from that shower a new and refreshed man.

EZ had laid some new clothes on the sink: a pair of sweatpants, socks, and a 1996 Colorado Avalanche Stanley Cup Champions T-shirt—all purchases he had made at the truck-stop/convenience store next door. It all fit, maybe a tad loose on the sweats. He had also bought a bunch of Beef Jerky, some protein bars, a carton of milk, some orange juice, a box of Grape-Nuts and a bag of Cheetos.

I opened up the bag of jerky, sat on one of the beds and flipped on the tube to some program about Evel Knievel. I held the channel there, but with the volume low.

EZ was at the table eating a protein bar and Cheetos and writing in a small, leather-bound notebook. He would scribble, pause, scratch his chin, take a bite from the bar, scribble, pause, do a calculation in his head, eat a Cheeto, then scribble some more. He went on like this for a good five minutes.

Evel jumped over twenty buses.

EZ stopped writing and looked over at me. “You mind me asking you a question?”

“Go for it.”

“You said you met Col. West one time before. When?”

“I don’t know. I had a tripped-out mescaline vision of meeting him right before I met you, but I think the actual meeting was well before that. I can’t be sure.”

“They probably had you pilled-out when you originally met. You recall anything he said to you?”

“He called me a hero.”

“And lemme make certain I got this straight: this recent time he gave you the song and dance of you’re-a-guinea-pig-for-an-experimental-psychotropic-drug-and-everything-is-a-figment-of-your-imagination.”

Knievel cleared some more busses. “Yup. That about covers it.”

EZ fiddled with his pen. “Man, what is his gig?”

“What do you mean?”

“We both know the Fillono angle is a ruse; he’s using Fillono for different fronts for his secretive enterprises. And he’s probably trying to track down this Moroni fella. But what’s he roped you into?” He shoved a Cheeto into his mouth and wiped off his finger with a handkerchief he had in his shirt pocket. He was more thinking aloud at this point than talking to me. “Maybe he thought you and Fillono together might have sparked some collective memory jive and fleshed out some more intel on this Moroni cat. Then he came to nab you … for what? Dial in a new program probably. He didn’t remove your tracer, so he wants you to do what you are doing. Maybe I am part of it … maybe I’m also who he’s trying to smoke out. But for what reason? Can’t tell right now unless he moves in on me.”

“One more thing that might interest you.”

“What’s that?”

Evel Knievel revved up his cycle for a big jump over a large fountain in Las Vegas.

“He asked me if I had ever heard of somebody called Atoz Al Ways. At the time, I hadn’t. I actually thought I had misheard him, that he’d asked me ‘what was the day.’ Anyway, while I was out there in the desert, Atoz Al Ways bungee-jumped into my reality, which was actually me going into his reality, and notified me he was the author of this reality and told me I was supposed to save the universe by finishing my book.”

EZ Buck’s face registered slight dumbfoundedness.

Evel Knievel crashed hard.

I gave EZ the rest of the lowdown on my strange briefing I had with Colonel West: the morphing of the room into what I perceived as a “time ship,” the paralysis and inability to speak, the entire tale. Then I told him all about the encounter with Atoz Al Ways. I waited for him to either: a) promote and corroborate my story with a supplemental cockamamie quadruple-twist spy yarn requiring hyper-distention of the mind to figure out, or b) that I was in need psychological help.

He did neither. He just sat there and thought.

THE FOLLOWING are the contents of one Edward Bikaver’s head as he sat in bed, ruminating in the Vagabond Inn Motel off I-70 in Grand Junction, Colorado. (Note: edited by the Author for clarity).

All right, Ed—you got this. You can reckon this shit out. Your man EZ is here to help. Who are the players? Colonel West, that’s obvious…. File him in the antag. (“antagonist” truncated) category.

Dr. Götzefalsch—my “mind technician”—cash is on him being in the employ of West. He’s the wind-up toy tech. antag. Damn those Cheetos look good.

Fillono: a well-meaning—hate to say it—rube, also being used by the Colonel but not as nefarious. More like a business deal but Fillono either knows he is dealing with some shifty dudes and chooses to look the other way or has no clue because he is so wrapped up in his art-institute gig he just thinks he got really lucky. Either way, non-antag….

Mona: damn. She’s a wildcard. Worst-case scenario: probably in the employ of Dr. Götzefalsch and the Colonel. Remember what my pops always said: coincidences are like the poop of a unicorn, son—you don’t smell em’ ‘cause they don’t exist. But I seem to have fallen for her. Oh well. I’ll just file that one in the token “I am a fool for love” category.

Froward Moroni: another wildcard. My hypotheses is that he is either a deep-cover change-agent working for or with the Colonel or was working for/with them and went off the reservation, like EZ said.

They want this “book”—this Planet Fever, or want me to finish it, or give up the rights to it; and they want to know whether I am familiar with this dude named “Atoz Al Ways.” Atoz Al Ways: obviously an enemy to them, and a player of significance and weight. They think that if I know him, or about him, then I have some information that is of value to them. That reminds me of that hippie couple that was in front of the liquor store a while back, and they handed me a pamphlet with an airbrushed interstellar, shades-wearing guy (who looked very similar to Atoz) with the words “A to Z, Always” on it…. Poop of a unicorn, son. No such thing as coincidences….

My conclusion: I am being tracked and hounded for some coded or valuable article that is in this “work-in-progress”—obviously also of importance to this Al Ways—and I don’t know why, this is just some piece-of-shit novel I’ve been cobbling out in between bouts of insanity, writer’s block and blackout drinking. Now that I’ve “found” this book of life out there in the desert, what’s next? Is that the missing piece of the puzzle? Damn, those Cheetos look good.

“WHAT’S THE deal with this book of yours?” EZ asked.

“Just something I’ve been piecing together since I don’t know when.” I chewed on a thick piece of jerky. “It’s a farce. It’s a testament to my procrastination. Most of all, it’s a mess.”

I hoped EZ didn’t ask to read it because I found it embarrassing to talk about that thing. How could I explain a work that made nonsense, had no coherent storyline, and was never going to be finished?

“You should finish it. Starting tonight. Then see what happens.”

What EZ prescribed was ludicrous. The thing was in various notebooks scattered in areas I couldn’t remember—that’s the problem with being a drunk on pills. I couldn’t recall where I had left off, if that even mattered. I let EZ know these things.

“Be right back.” EZ stepped out of the motel room.

I chewed the same piece of jerky. Damn this stuff took a while to masticate.

EZ returned with a little black box that had a lamp on top and wires protruding from the side. He set it on the table in front of me.

“This little invention of mine I call the Strobe Enlightener,” EZ said.

“What’s it do?”

“Do? It’s gonna help you, my friend. Do me a favor and kick off the tube.”

I turned off the TV as EZ plugged in his apparatus and hit a toggle switch on the side. A light flashed, stopped, flashed, stopped, flashed…. Radio static and hum permeated into my ears and overlapped into my field of vision in the form of blue, green and red phosphene globs dancing in front of my eyes, which began to flutter.

I was going into a trance….

SO EDDIE Bikaver found himself, once again, in a trance-like state. How many times had he been in altered states? Too many to recall. He needed stickers like on the back of an RV with all the states he’d been in, all of them in the mind and under various circumstances; sometimes intentionally via the use of recreational and not-so-recreational drugs, other times via hypnotic suggestion, yet other times unbeknownst to him that it was happening at all. Psychiatrists, psychopathic military men, weird inter-dimensional beings, vagabond artists, boyfriends of girls he had tried to hit on, men in gas-masks and black suits—all of them shared one commonality: they had delivered him into an altered state of one kind or another. Now it was EZ Buck’s turn via some sort of hypnotic-strobe device. It worked.

EZ’s voice entered Ed’s mind. “Mona Malena.”

A blonde woman with compassionate blue eyes arrived into his thoughts. She painted on a canvas—Eddie couldn’t make out what she was painting. She smiled—she was glad to see him. His heart fluttered. He hadn’t seen her since when? Who knows. But he was glad to see her.

But: they were not alone. The doorknob to the bathroom jiggled and the door opened. Out strutted a man wearing a pearly-white grin along with khaki shorts and a Hawaiian print shirt. The man was Colonel Parley West. You could say Ed was perplexed.

“How the hell do you two know each other?” Ed asked.

Mona set down her brush. “Try to remember.”

Ed watched as Colonel West strolled across the room. He sniffed a beer mug, then poured some orange juice into it. Ed zeroed in on the beer mug and flashes of memory sparked in his mind: a bar … the blonde, Mona … a discussion about a plan … Ed’s memory needs to be erased … Colonel West gives Ed a pill … Ed takes the pill with his beer … West smashes a fake “stunt” beer mug over Ed’s head and the rest is history.

“Sonofabitch! You two have been behind all this!” Ed shouted.

“Yes, Eddie, we have. And we’re going to give you the low-down as to what the gig is. No Bull.”

At this point Eddie Bikaver smelled bullshit everywhere, but he decided to entertain the tale Colonel Parley West and Mona were about to tell….

HERE’S THE story Colonel West told to Eddie, with Mona interjecting where necessary:

Eddie Bikaver was a drunk, hack writer who needed money. He spotted an ad in the back of a weekly rag stating “Clinical Trials—Easy $$$” and called the 800 number. He made an appointment for the physical and interview, and a week later he went there. He passed the physical (barely, his blood pressure was on the verge of being too high) but was generally fit to be a professional “guinea pig” for a new drug that was being developed primarily for military use but also for research purposes. The drug was actually “nano-robots” that went into the subject’s neural pathways and proceeded to map-out everything in the subject’s mind.

That was phase one.

Phase two, the nano-robots created a holographic “map” of the mind, assessed it, then fed the data into a computer.

During phase three, the computer relayed new information to the nano-robots, which in turn created new electro-chemical “sparks” which would—in essence—create a matrix of new perceived thoughts and surrounding realities for the subject. While this was occurring, the subject was to keep a journal of his perceptions, thoughts, emotional and physical states, as well as anything else that came to mind. The researchers compared the technical data with the subject’s “creative” data to see what did what when where and how in the subject’s brain.

This was the big and highly secretive “mapping of the mind” project.

And certain bigwig business interests—working with certain advanced research military interests—had a lot at stake. And a lot was riding on Subject Zero: one Edward Thomas Bikaver and his journals, aka his “Little Book of Life,” and its compendium:Planet Fever.

Technically, Eddie “owned” it (because of a clerical error, they had forgotten to give him the paperwork where any writing he did while part of the trial was their property), so—ahem—they would really appreciate it if he would hand over the stuff and sign the paperwork, please.

What about Froward Moroni?

He was a former researcher, venture businessman and entrepreneur who helped jumpstart the program, but then had ideas of his own to make the drug “open source”—that is—allow anyone and everyone to have access to it. He felt there should be no monopoly on the mind, or the manipulation thereupon—and that anyone and everyone should be able to do whatever they wanted with what was their own property—their mind. The bigwigs (as well as the top brass) disagreed—they thought such unbridled, unmonitored access to such a powerful drug would cause chaos: everybody would literally be living in their own world, or worlds. Not a good business plan, nor a viable military strategy.

Since Moroni already had flown the coup with a large supply of early incarnations of the drug, they reckoned they would use Subject Zero—Edward Bikaver (so far the only “official” subject) as a lure, to see if Moroni would approach him, and they could monitor and/or subdue the man before he spread too much chaos.

Phase four integrated with the plan anyway, since it entailed field research, meaning the subject (Eddie) was to “live” outside the confines of the facility and in his natural habitat—the “real world.” That’s how they tracked back to the Moroni “art camp,” where they found that Fillono, Chuck “the Born Again” Poet, Lustra Love-Joy, and Marcel “the Champ” had been given a steady regimen of the drug by Moroni (and so were currently under varying degrees of observation and treatment, by the way; Chuck and Lustra at the facility in Vegas, Fillono at the facility in the Colorado Rockies, and Marcel “the Champ” at a top secret joint in the Antarctic).

Mona Malena was an aspiring actress originally from Akron who worked part-time as a nurse/assistant at the clinical trials lab. She took the job to help pay for her student loans and to pay the bills, and the hours were flexible so she could go out on acting auditions. By signing on as an employee to the lab, she tacitly signed herself on to the “project” and became a de facto “military/intelligence” asset. Because she was an actress and had rudimentary nursing skills, they figured she would be a perfect handler and monitor of Eddie while he was “out in the field.” She was bound to secrecy by virtue of her de facto military/intelligence status (and this project was and is Top Secret, mind you), and had to fulfill her role as “girlfriend” of Eddie or risk severe penalties of money and prison. Upon fulfilling her role, she has been promised a lucrative career in the movie business.

Oh, Eddie, but she really does care about you. Believe it or not.

The powers that be needed Eddie to sign the paperwork now, please, and hand over the documents, so they could wrap up this project and send him on his merry way.

EDDIE HEARD a loud “click” and snapped back into the motel room. EZ unplugged the “Strobe Enlightener” and wrapped up the cord. He put the contraption back into its box, set the box under the table, grabbed the Cheetos bag, looked inside and was happy to see one left, which he promptly ate.

“You have got some intriguing stuff cogitating up in that dome of yours, that is factual.”

Was that real? Or had Eddie just invented it as another fabricated piece of fiction?

EZ perceived his concern and said, “We should get back to Whynot and nab some more intel on West and pick Fillono’s brain. I smell BS somewhere and can feel the breeze of a fan getting close to the pile.”

EZ wadded up the Cheetos bag and tossed it into the little motel wastebasket.

“All right. Let’s stare at our eyelids for the night. Bright and early tomorrow we grub at the diner I spotted across the way, then hit the road. We’re only about four hours away.”

EZ grabbed the bed closest to the door and Eddie took the other one. Eddie turned off his light, wished his companion a “good night” and fell asleep, to dream about driving a car into the ocean and rolling along the ocean floor. The car filled up with water but it didn’t matter, because Eddie realized he could still breathe. He wasn’t worried. That’s about all he can remember before being awakened by the sound of an annoying and rough buzzing: the motel alarm clock.

In the morning, they got up, flossed, brushed their teeth, slapped on deodorant, dressed and packed their few belongings, then headed for Candi’s Diner across the road.

The sun was just poking over the Rocky Mountains to the east, and it was cool but not cold. Not a cloud in the sky.

Inside the diner, a few truckers sat at the counter sipping coffee and BS-ing with the waitress or the hash slinger in the back. As EZ and Eddie entered, the other patrons checked the duo out with relative indifference then resumed their banter. EZ and Eddie took a few seats at the end of the counter and checked the laminated menu.

Eddie was reading about the various ingredients (up to three, $.50 for each additional one) included in Candi’s Famous Omelets when he caught it out of the corner of his eye: a boot wrapped with duct tape walking in his general vicinity and then its owner taking the stool to Ed’s left at the counter.

It was none other than the movie-going trucker he had met back at the Free Diner outside Los Angeles: Woods.

He had on his trademark flannel, ball cap, shades, and Cheshire Cat grin. He stared down at the menu, aware of Eddie and perhaps waiting for him to say something.

Ed obliged. “Holy shit!”

Woods nodded his head, but kept staring at the menu.

Ed turned to EZ, who was perplexed by his outburst, and asked if there was a guy with ball cap, shades, flannel and duct-taped footwear seated to his left.

EZ looked around to Eddie’s left, checked off each article he had mentioned to himself, then said, “Uh-huh.”

Ed looked back at Woods and said, “Woods.”

Woods said, “Yup.”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Made a run to Grand Junction from L.A., going to head back today,” he said, then looked up at the waitress. “Coffee. Black.”

Coincidence? Eddie didn’t think so.

“Pretty wild, meeting you out here, at this time. What are the odds?” he said.

“You summoned me,” he said, then slid the menu back into the holder. “Bacon and eggs, over easy.” He unfolded the movie section of the Rocky Mountain News.

Ed turned to EZ, who seemed to be either thinking hard or was perplexed by the scenario transpiring.

“Do you have any clue about what the hell’s going on?” Eddie asked, a tad bewildered.

EZ shrugged his shoulders then ordered French toast and sausages.

Eddie took a break from the scene of perplexity to order an omelet with Swiss cheese, mushrooms, bacon and spinach.

Woods was circling movies with his highlighter.

What the hell was going on here? Eddie had no recollection of summoning the mysterious truck driver Woods. As a matter of fact, he had no recollection of ever having in his possession the means by which to summon him. He had never gotten his number or address.

Woods sensed Eddie’s fluster, and what came next blew the minds of both Eddie Bikaver and Ezekiel Buckminster.

“LET ME put it another way. You will have summoned me here, from outside time. By including me in your story, you have brought me here without even realizing it, and so far I’m still in the story because you still have control of it. So right at this moment it might make no sense to you as a character why I am here at this time, but it is happening.” Woods sipped some of his coffee.

The tone and pitch of Woods’ voice triggered another memory. Eddie flashbacked to the cassette tape interviews in his truck’s glove box. There was only one explanation for this bizarre “coincidence”—Woods was Agent W, the former “hyper-dimensional” being who went AWOL from the bad-guys squad. Trying to do his bit to help out the moronic humans. Eddie was that moronic human that Woods was helping out. It had to be.

EZ remained cool and steady. “Man, we’re gonna need some empirical evidence to back what you’re saying.”

Woods sipped more of his coffee. “You got a red notebook in your little backpack there.” He pointed to the backpack Eddie had brought in with him and had set down by his stool. “May I?”

Eddie did, in fact have a little red notebook in his backpack. His journal was filled with scribbled out half-baked ideas for Planet Fever and some dossiers folded up and tucked between the pages.

“Uh, you want to see it?” Eddie asked.

“I want you to let me write something in it. Only with your permission, though.”

Eddie unzipped the backpack and brandished the notebook, handing it over to Woods.

“Have at it,” Eddie said.

Woods took out an expensive silver pen from his flannel pocket,opened the notebook to an empty page, and began writing.

The walls of Candi’s Diner began to shape-shift and reverberate. All the other people in the place (besides EZ, Eddie and Woods) faded away.

EZ and Eddie found themselves sitting on stools inside the cabin of what looked to be the inside of a spaceship with low soft lighting (for mood) and Jazzy whale songs permeating from all around. EZ attempted to perceive the sound system, but couldn’t seem to locate any speakers.

The air was neither hot nor too cold. They couldn’t tell whether or not they were moving. The walls pulsed and lit up and were adorned with fine, intricate patterns, like a neural-network.

Woods continued to write. As he did, his voice manifested inside the heads of both EZ and Eddie….

We are inside my rig—which is actually an outward manifestation of my mind, which I have invited the both of you to inhabit. As you’ve guessed, I’m not completely human. I’m part human and part Tritosofthalmian, which is a breed of being about 10 billion years your senior, with the ability to outwardly manifest little pockets of reality at the drop of a hat. That’s why we are used as assets by galactic military intelligence interests, hired by multiverse media operations, and brought on as PR specialists for interstellar politicians. We invent reality.

Without going into great detail, the last 10,000 years has seen the consolidation of companies who make and own property of realities and it has gone from many private enterprises to one monolithic conglomerate corporate/financial/political/militaristic entity. You know it as the New (and Improved) Interstellar Syndicate. You see, the OAR (Originator of All Realities), Atoz Al Ways, wanted to populate his multiverse with billions of little “reality inventors” so they could go off and make their own creations. That’s how it went for billions of years until his main partner thought he had better plans and defected from the company, stealing many trade secrets from Atoz. Since then, Phos Atomos Paradosi, Atoz’ former buddy and business partner but now the head of the N(aI)IS, has been “acquiring” all the reality-rights around time and space, and is on the verge of locking out the original CEO, Atoz, from His own creation.

As a countermeasure, Atoz spread his shares around the Universes to various “entities” called RAs and REs (Reality Authors and Reality Engineers) so those entities would continue to expand Atoz’s vision and stave off the takeover. So long as Atoz’s interests were creating and expanding and not giving up their own “rights” to the Syndicate, the Syndicate couldn’t take complete control. The Syndicate employed me as an RA/RE tracker to help locate Atoz’s creative agents.

For reasons I will save for another story, I’ll just say I defected. A few of us have, because we are creatives, not bureaucratic hound dogs for a creative-stifling corporation. But there are still many trackers around, and they have hit the jackpot and located a cell of RAs and REs, right here on the planet Earth. All but two of the RA/REs have been coerced, bamboozled, or just plain sold out their rights. Only two remain: one a Reality Author and the other a Reality Engineer.

The Reality Author is you, Edward T. Bikaver.

The Reality Engineer is you, Ezekiel Buckminster.

EZ AND Eddie watched as Woods continued writing in the notebook. The entire time he telepathically “told” them the tale, he had been writing diligently. When he stopped writing and put the pen back into his flannel pocket, the place morphed back into Candi’s Diner, prior inhabitants et. al.

The counter waitress slid EZ’s plate of French toast and sausages to him and the omelet to Eddie. Her nonchalance notified the two that, to her, nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. In her reality, three guys had been sitting at the counter the entire time, one writing stuff into a notebook.

EZ was, as usual, deep in thought, solving whatever the equation was that he thought needed to be solved.

Eddie was, as usual, perplexed; his mind spinning in a million directions, wondering how he would be able to take all this information down and put it into his novel.

Everyone sat with a quiet attentiveness, eating breakfast and ruminating over the ontological question: what next?

What next indeed.

Woods handed the notebook back to Eddie, along with a cassette tape bearing a striking resemblance to the one Ed had listened to a while back—the one that his lame tape-deck in his truck had eaten up.

“Word to the wise: always make back-up copies. Hard copies, if possible.” Woods took out a wad of cash, paid for all of their meals, left a nice tip, and stood up. “See you around.”

He made his way to the exit, grabbing a toothpick out of the little dispenser next to the register as he did so.

EZ stared at the counter, rubbing his temples. This was one equation he wasn’t certain he would be able to figure out.

Eddie cleared his throat. “I’m going to guess that you experienced the same thing.”

EZ half-nodded. “Maybe you’d like to be the one to verbalizeit, since you’re the certifiably crazy one, and I have a feeling what you are about to spit is going to sound non-compos mentis, cray-to-z.”

Eddie messed with his napkin, folding it then refolding it. “Uh, yeah. That guy Woods just came in here, ordered breakfast, asked to write in my notebook, began writing stuff down and as he did both you and I found ourselves in his inter-dimensional ship, also known as ‘his head’ and were given the lowdown that we’re both being tracked down by beings whose task it is to get us to give up our ‘rights’ to aspects of reality that have been bequeathed to us by the CEO of all known universes. That’s what I got out of the conversation. You?”

“Yup—that’s about it in a nutshell. So either we just shared an identical hallucination, or Woods is one hell of a magic man, or we just hit the Twilight Zone full steam.”

The waitress came over. “Everything all right, fellas? Can I get you more coffee?”

“Everything is brilliant. I’m all good on the coffee. Thank you, ma’am,” EZ said.

Eddie shook his head and thanked her.

They picked up and walked to the exit, Eddie grabbing a mint and EZ grabbing a toothpick on the way out.

“MMM … CINNAMON,” EZ said after popping the toothpick into his mouth. He fired up the Camaro and scooted out onto the road. “I don’t think hallucinations like that can be shared to a T. We wouldn’t have had precisely identical experiences, because hallucinations occur inside the mind and we would’ve had differing deals going on. I’m ranking that one as low on the probability.” EZ veered to the on-ramp and accelerated onto the Interstate. “Magic or hypnosis? Possible. But then one would have to ask: why would a cat like that go through all the trouble of pulling a fast one like that on us? He had no motive. No payoff.” EZ grabbed his aviator shades from the visor and pulled it down. The morning sun was climbing over the Rocky Mountains, which they were driving into. “This one’s gotta be shaved with Occam’s Razor-blade, you feel me?”

Eddie checked his mind for what his pal EZ had just stated and its meaning. Ahh, yes, Occam’s Razor. The “keep it simple” philosophy, meaning that usually the simplest explanation tended to be the correct one, rather than a bunch of complicated mind-twisting to get at the conclusion.

So what EZ was getting at was this: Woods had transported the two into an alternative dimension, and had been forthright in his dissertation to them.

It was that simple.

The two sat in silence for a while, the growling muscle car engine working the inclines and curves of the interstate, which now wound its way through rocky canyons, paralleling the white-watered Colorado River.

“What the blazes is a ‘Reality Engineer’ anyway?” EZ said.

“You got me,” Eddie said.

“Hey, man—kick that cassette into the deck. Let’s check this jive to score some elucidations.”

He pulled the tape from his backpack and opened the case. It had a label with the words “The Thought Police: Art B. Wells’ Take on Real Reality” written on it with a green pen and the brand Memorex on the face. He slid the tape into the deck.

FROM THE hi-fi and perfectly equalized Blaupunkt speakers within Ezekiel Buckminster’s Z-28 Camaro poured forth spacey bumper music from a popular overnight radio show Eddie had become quite familiar with over the years:

“From Greenwich around back to Greenwich, from the South Pole to the North Pole—this is Art B. Well’s Take on Real Reality. We’re back and I’ve been talking to my guest who is an ex-covert operative who worked for an entity he calls ‘the tracking unit of the Thought Police.’ He claims to be of part alien descent, and has the capability to manifest reality, much like a painter or musician or writer can create works of art. He goes by the moniker ‘Agent W.’ So you say you were part of a ‘tracking’ unit. What, or who were you tracking?”

Agent W: “Our unit is to track down RAs and REs. Those are Reality Authors and Reality Engineers, who have been given special privilege to create and engineer realities. They are commissioned by the OAR of all known universes, OAR being ‘Originator of All Realities.’”

Art: “The Originator of All Realities? Wow, that sounds like a powerful guy.”

Agent W: “Indeed, the oldest and most powerful for a while. He is the only uncaused thing that exists, which nobody but he can quite fully comprehend. His pronounceable name is Atoz Al Ways. But anyway, his business partner, a cavalier by the name of Phos Atomos Paradosi held some different opinions about how the business should be run and operated, so he quit and took about a third of the company with him, along with trade secrets, etc.”

Art: “Why would this guy Phos go up against the most powerful being that exists?”

Agent W: “Hubris. And he thought the way the company was being run was too old school, unhip, and uncool. Plus, Atoz had plans to make these newer creations—humans—as co-creators and joint-stockholders of the company. Phos saw the future and saw his role both in the company and in the Universe becoming less and less relevant. He defected and set up his own rival company, which has been slowly taking over all the market share of the Universe.”

Art: “Hmm … wow. But isn’t this Phos character way out of his league? I mean, couldn’t the most powerful being that exists—Atoz—simply rub him out of existence?”

Agent W: “Great point. I’ve thought about that many times, and the answer is ‘yup.’ But I have concluded that Atoz is a being of principles and class. I mean he invented the concept of ‘principles’ and ‘class.’ Atoz has invented beings that are at liberty to choose how to conduct themselves in life. And he has stuck with that principle. He could’ve made a bunch of robots that he wound up and did exactly what he wanted them to do, but that would get boring quickly, especially when you have nothing but infinite time on your hands. He opted to populate a universe with creatures that could, in a manner of speaking, choose their destinies. They could opt to like Atoz or hate him. They could decide to work for him or against him. They could choose to ignore him. Whatever. Phos, on the other hand, prefers the ‘command-and-control’ method. He’s pretty much a control freak. But he pretends like he’s a nice guy. He’s a narcissist and a pathological liar, by the way.”

Art: “And so he set up his own shop, begins taking over realities from Atoz, to try to squeeze him out of his own Universe. Where do you come in?”

Agent W: “Well, Atoz figured out the takeover plans of his former buddy, Phos (he is, after all, the most sentient being who exists) and dispersed a large quantity of these beings I mentioned earlier called RAs and REs—you remember, Reality Authors and Reality Engineers—to continue manifesting Realities under the aegis of Atoz Al Ways and his company. So long as they are flooding the Universal market with their reality shares (so to speak—if the Universe continues ‘expanding’), Phos Atomos Paradosi’s shares become devalued. In other words, as long as there are beings with free will working for Atoz, Phos is not in complete control. And like I said, he is a control freak.”

Art: “Ahh.”

Agent W: “Where I and my kind come in is here: we’re a race of proto-inventors and creators who have mastered the craft of reality-manifestation via our minds. This makes us very efficient at detecting others with similar traits. Most beings in the Universe can read minds, but if you think about it that’s an awful lot of data to sift through if you want to track down specific entities. We have the ability to create realities around large amounts of people, and the non-creative ones will simply inhabit them, but the creative ones will attempt to break free from them, and that is how we are able to discern and discover them.”

Art: “Hmm, so it is like you’ve built a big aquarium and surrounded a bunch of fish, and only the ones you’re seeking would try to get out of it, so they’re the ones who bump into the glass.”

Agent W: “That is a great way of putting it, Art. You got it. They leave distinct ‘creative signatures’ and ‘thought patterns’ that we zero in on. Once we’ve tracked them down, we hand them over to the Mind Technicians and Operations specialists, who must first confirm our ‘catch’ is, in fact an asset of Atoz and not some anomalous rube that happens to have random creative undulations. Once they’re confirmed, they’re manipulated, coerced, cajoled, bamboozled, bribed, begged or psychically manipulated to give up their creative and technical interests. Many give in without realizing what they have done, because Atoz had never overtly told them who they were in the first place. For all intents and purposes, by omitting the detail in their consciousness that they were candidate agents for Atoz Al Ways’ grand scheme made it harder for them to be tracked down. And he likes to test their mettle that way. Also, many of them do not know what they had given up because they’re inhabiting a fabricated reality created by Phos’ agents (like what I was) and become so confused and mystified by what is going on that they just want to be left alone. So they give up.”

Art: “Wow. So you’re saying there could be other RAs and REs out there right now, listening to this program, who have no clue of their true nature?”

Agent W: “Yup.”

Art: “What would you say to them, if you could get a message to one who might be going through the ordeal of being manipulated and coerced, without knowing why?”

Agent W: “If you’re experiencing excessive déjà vu or blackouts, beware. If you’re inhabiting a series of reiterated scenarios over and over, this could be their attempt to revise the nature of your reality, eventually wear you down so that you quit. Give up on life, so to speak. If you have a creative impulse, do not stop doing it. No matter what. And if someone is trying to make you sign over the rights to something you’ve created and it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it. Oh, and if you see a third eyeball appear on somebody’s forehead, watch out—you’re in the presence of one of my contemporaries, and they do not have your best interest at heart.”

EZ ejected the tape and allowed the drone of the muscle car’s motor to be the only sound audible for the rest of the drive, until they got back to Whynot.

THEY BOARDED the Tesla Express gondola and headed up the mountain.

“Man, this is some deep shit.” EZ took a pinch of snuff and snorted.

“You think it’s bull?” Eddie said.

The gondola whizzed up the mountain. The sky was blue and the day warm.

EZ studied his snuff tin and glanced over to Eddie. “If it’s legit, Fillono probably was a Reality Author, and maybe got cut a deal. That’s the way I see it. You art guys were all corralled by these hunters then declawed—all except you, at least not yet, anyway. Seems as though Fillono and his Utopia resort was a plan to lure and snag me, the Engineer. Of course I jumped at the chance to tout my skills helping to engineer a scene like this place.” He looked out the window and shook his head. “And now they got us together, probably confirmed as the fellas they want to turn inside-out.”

Ed had no response. If this were all true, what could they do about it? Just wait, or resist? For how long? Eddie wanted to fight back, but against what or who? It’s simple when the opponent is a known person or entity, but a full-scale universal, hyper-dimensional conglomerate? He recalled something he had written back in the Moroni camp:

“Filing a declaration of war against the New (and Improved) Interstellar Syndicate at this point is akin to riding into battle on a mule and wielding nothing but a fork against a Roman legion.”

“I don’t even have a mule,” Ed mumbled, “and Moroni must’ve been in the same boat as me.”

“Eh?” EZ said, then took another snort of snuff.

On top of the mountain, Fillono stood out by some picnic tables, showing students how to properly expose for a 16mm Bolex camera as Ed and EZ approached. His animated expressiveness and charged-up excitement inspired those students, and for a glimmer of a moment Ed felt the exuberance, which was short-lived, for the vastness of the Rocky Mountains brought back perspective: this mountain range was very big, and it was just a small part of a planet that was very, very big, which was part of a very, very, very big galaxy, and so on … and the N(aI)IS allegedly controlled most of it.

Even if what Woods had explained were true, and Eddie in fact held an incredible responsibility and power, did he really care?

Certainly, he thought he wanted to fight, out of some loosely cobbled-together sense of duty and rebelliousness (as well as to perhaps impress Mona)…. But who really gave a shit if some bastards wanted to take over the entire show? Could it be any worse than it was now? Maybe, after all was said and done, that’s the way the cookie had crumbled in Atoz’ “grand Universal experiment.” In attempting to make beings with free will who created their own realities, Atoz’ venture had resulted in the very thing that was happening—people bailing out on him or selling out for the easy reward, or not giving a damn either way.

If almost every single other “Reality Author” had ceded control to the bastards, did a drunk hack like Edward Bikaver actually stand a chance? Eddie thought about it: most of the Universe would rather follow a narcissistic control freak like Phos and his gang, than a free-thinking, freewheeling “outside the box” Creator. Maybe Phos would just grant Eddie his own “ideal” existence, like the one given to Fillono, who seemed content, happy, and living his dream, even if it was, quite possibly, a delusion. That wasn’t such a bad deal, right?

That is, if that was the deal, and Fillono had in fact made it. Eddie didn’t know for certain yet, but he and EZ were about to find out.

“EDDIE. EZ. You must-a-trust me. I am not sure what kind of-a-deal I make, but the Colonel, he-a-promise me that what he is doing is for the greater good. I am no getting younger, and he-a-give me free reign of this two mountains. I can-a-run the place how I want, and teach the youth to be better people and artists. This makes the world-a-better, no? I get to make ongoing films all-a-day and night. I tell you all of this.”

These are the thoughts that passed through Eddie’s mind: Who could argue with Fillono’s logic? He owned an old ski resort and had the opportunity to convert it into a utopia. He was teaching students how to share their creative expression. But, was he merely under the impression that he was making films? Or, instead, had someone duped him into acting as a surveillance mechanism to capture footage of the creative minds? Minds that Phos and his constituents wanted to control, manipulate, exploit and erase? If so, Fillono probably wasn’t aware of those little details. He was an artist who had found his home.

“But didn’t you wonder why the military would have such a vested interest in setting up shop with you, why big capital would want to dump money into this venture? I’m speaking just from an economics viewpoint,” EZ said.

“Yes. And I asked him. And he-a-tell me. He is part of a team that is meant to protect the planet from, what can I say, Inter-dimensional Raiders. This place is also a base. He is-a-training Astral Monks who are going to counterattack the alien enemy. I make a fictional film about it, you not remember, EZ?”

“I remember,” EZ said.

Eddie had read a review about it in one of those Independent Film rags, and the reviewer was one of those Eastern Establishment Elites from NY who Ed surmised had grown up spoiled enough to be able to see every movie that came out, but too uninspired to make any movies of value himself. The pompous critic tore into Fillono’s film, Stand of the Astral Monks, deeming the movie “Camp, schlock and cheese tramped up in the guise of Art Cinema. Pointlessly listless, over-the-top and whatever the message of the film is (if there is one) I think the one guy on enough LSD to send a horse through time probably appreciates the effort. No dice.”(He rated the films with “dice” or “no dice,” with either a picture of a die at the end of the review or a picture of a die crossed out). “What an asshole,” Eddie said after reading the review.

Sounds like Fillono’s fallen for the same rube bait song-n-dance I was given by Götzefalsch: the enemy was trying to sucker me into believing that they are the good guys, and we all are in this together fighting some other real bad guys, thought Eddie.

Fillono looked around, scoping the area. He crouched down a little and spoke in a more hushed tone: “Guys, things are-a-not what they seem like they are. Crazy things are going on, too crazy to talk about in the same-a-way we talk about the weather or sports. Crazy things. So crazy, that if you talk about them like you are-a-serious you will be called crazy. So we use art and poetry and music and literature and film and photography to talk about the stuff.”

EZ took a pinch of snuff and snorted. “Boss, I feel ya. But you’re telling me that this Colonel cat took you behind closed doors, told you all about some secret, trans-dimensional cabal invading our turf, asked you to work with him to help out, and slid a briefcase full of cash across the table to you?”

“I know, I know. It all sounds impossible and fantastic. But this is-a-the case. He wanted me also to-a-help find Moroni, because he was getting more-a-dangerous, and he also owed the Colonel money. But I cannot tell anymore about it. I am sworn to-a-secrecy.”

Eddie and EZ exchanged glances.

“Why did I end up getting black-bagged by him, interrogated then tossed into the loony bin? Come on, old pal. The guy has a third-eye that appears out of nowhere on his forehead. He’s one of them. None of this makes any sense.”

Fillono just shrugged his shoulders, raised an eyebrow, and shook his head. “It does make-a-sense, but not how-a-you think it should. I-a-cannot say any more.”

The three stood there for a few moments, then a team of students swarmed around them with their sputtering Bolex wind-up cameras.

“Maybe you two need-a-to go on mountain bike ride. To clear your heads. Take a new trail we made called ‘Brave New Trail’ to-a-the end, then a little pathway to the north of trail that is very unused. Very scenic.”

EZ shook his head and pshawed.

Eddie said, “Man, this is no time for bike riding. This is some serious shit.”

Fillono approached them and placed a hand on each of their shoulder. He looked them both in the eyes and said, “Take-a-the ride. Trust me.”

“YOU WORKING on anything?” Lisa, the mountaintop librarian asked. The library also acted as a bike rental shop in the warm months, ski rental shop in the winter.

Ed shrugged his shoulders. “I’m writing a reality piece, All That There Is For Now, which is essentially about what’s up. It’s an addendum to My Book of Life, which is part of a larger work-in-progress, called Planet Fever.”

“And how’s that going?”

“Shitty, I’m all out of ideas. If I don’t finish, the universe—as we know it—will cease to exist, and will be replaced by a cheap, shoddy and uninspired imitation of it.”

She smiled. “I hate when that happens. I hope you finish. Now, what can I get you fellas?”

EZ leaned over the counter. “May we check out two trail bikes, ma’am? Preferably ones with shock absorbers, please.”

“You are such a gentleman, Ezekiel Buckminster. ‘Twould be my pleasure, sir.” She smiled.

EZ blushed.

I sensed—I mean Eddie sensed a sweet romantic charge between the two as they stood there beaming at one another for a moment. Then she turned to go get the bicycles.

“Cool chick,” Eddie said.

EZ nodded. “Yeah. Real cool chick.”

The “Brave New Trail” was a long mountain bike trail that traversed its way along the backside of the resort, zigzagging its way down to the bottom and near what EZ called “off limits” turf.

It had been a while since Ed had ridden a bike, so he had to re-acclimate himself with all the gears.

“Remember to lean back if you get going too fast. And use the back brake first before you ease in the front one. Otherwise….”

“Otherwise I know—I’ll go over the handlebars. Trust me, I’ve learned that one the hard way.”

Once they got comfortable on their rides, they made their way down the path. The trail rolled and wound in and out of the forest. They coasted over a few little bridges, traversed across ski runs, and dashed around berms. Eddie was getting high from the mountain air brushing against his face and the exhilaration of the ride. The flickering silver light in and out of the trees enhanced the experience.

Better than any drug. Better than booze.

At the bottom of the mountain, the trail opened into a lush valley inhabited by an old chair lift and a few picnic tables. EZ rode around the perimeter, searching for the inconspicuous trail Fillono had mentioned.

“Like the boss said, here it is,” EZ said, and began riding the barely-visible trail encompassed by tall grass.

Eddie followed him, and after pedaling though the valley at a casual pace for about ten minutes they came to an old barbed-wire fence with a sign that said Private Property: No Trespassing.

EZ dismounted from his bike and said, “Private Property? That makes no sense. I know for a fact this is the military property. And they just got this rickety ‘ol fence with this sign?”

“Maybe they’re trying to be more low key,” Eddie said.

EZ lowered his bike into the grass. “Let’s check it out.”

Eddie followed EZ to the fence, and they climbed up and over to the other side.

THEY WALKED through the tall grass and Ed took stock of the huge mountains surrounding them, the deep blue skies with the interlude of a silvery-white cloud blocking the sun every now and then, and the fresh mountain breeze blowing through the trees.

After a half-mile or so, EZ stopped walking. He turned his head this way and that, with his ears perked up, listening.

“You hear that?” he asked.

Through the grassy breeze and the cicadas and random bird, there it was: a low, droning hum. Yes, indeed Eddie heard it. He nodded.

“It’s real low, and pulsating.” EZ continued walking.

They walked and the low, pulsating hum became more pronounced. Whatever emitted this hum was either generating or receiving a tremendous amount of power. Ed knew this because as they got closer the hair on his arms stood up and something akin to static electricity permeated around his skin, hair and teeth; and because EZ told him this was a sign of something emitting or receiving a tremendous amount of power.

The closer they got, the greater the hum, until they came upon it: a satellite dish about as wide as a Volkswagen Bus next to a small transmission tower, which was loosely disguised as a tree. EZ examined the configuration and found more mini-satellite dishes on the tree/tower, pointed back at the direction from which they came. He then examined the dish, and visually traced it to where it was pointed to, which was toward the top of an adjacent peak.

“Up there.” He pointed. “That’s where this dish is receiving its signal, and it looks like it’s relaying it back toward the chair lift. I’m willing to bet the lift acts as a cable relay also. Million Dollar Pyramid inquiry: who is relaying what from where to where and why?”

“It’s gotta be military,” Eddie said.

EZ shook his head. “Naw, man. Military does it in a controlled, tight way. This would be like stumbling upon a Navy sub just parked on the beach in some remote beach in northern Cali. Ain’t gonna happen. This has to be some covert shit, because they’re hiding it plain site, and who would think that something this big and important would just be out here unguarded with just a janky barbed-wire fence and a rusty keep out sign?”

Ed caught EZ’s drift: most people, if they wandered to here for whatever reason, which would most likely be some lost hikers or, in the winter, a lost skier, wouldn’t think twice about this. If they gave it any thought, they’d just think the guy that owned this property really took his satellite TV seriously.

“But isn’t this military property?” Ed asked.

EZ kept his gaze on the dish and the tower, shaking his head. “Supposedly. But how do we know that? Maybe this is some ‘off the books’ military operation Col. West cooked up, kind of like that Iran/Contra jive a few years back. Them black-ops types like to do it that way, work with legit businesses as cover, and use them, without the other channels in government, or even in their own military branch, any wiser. Shit, maybe he just told Fillono this is military property. Why wouldn’t Fillono believe him? He is, after all, a bonafide military Colonel.”

Ed listened and nodded his head. The low, pulsating hum was rather soothing, and Ed caught himself zoning out a few times. His eyes wandered to the top of the mountain, where there was a giant satellite dish pointing up to the sky, directly at the daytime full moon. Where had he seen that image before?

Mona’s painting….

“Gotta check it out.” EZ snapped Eddie out of his rumination.

“Huh?”

“We gotta get up on top of that mountain and see what the gig is up there. My cash is down on that being the primary hook-up, where the main signal is received and/or transmitted. If I nab some of my equipment, come back and hike up that mountain, I might be able to crack this cipher. You feeling me?”

“EZ.”

“Yeah young blood?”

Ed took off his backpack and took out his notebook and a pen. He began to write, then stopped. He tossed the pen back into the pack, fumbled around then brandished a stubby pencil, worn down almost to the eraser, which was also almost completely worn down.

“I feel you,” Eddie said, and wrote: I guarantee our conversation is being monitored.

EZ turned his attention away from the dish and focused on Ed. He nodded after he read what Eddie had written.

Eddie said, “I’m beat, man. I think I need to go home, figure out this thing with Mona, and sort all this other shit out.” As he said that, he scribbled: but I gotta plan, and it involves you and me splitting up.

EZ slowly nodded his head. “I feel you.”

“I don’t think I can handle all this pressure right now. With the book. With all this ‘saving the universe’ stuff … I just need some time.” He wrote: it involves me handing myself, and my work, over to the bastards.

“Yeah, this shit is pretty crazy,” EZ said. He gestured for Eddie to hand him the pencil and notebook, then wrote: Hand yourself over? And the book? Are you crazy?

“You bet,” Eddie said. He took the notebook and pencil. I am going to write out the plan, then you will read it, then I will erase it. But it must be timed perfectly.

EZ didn’t say it or write it, but Ed intuited what he was thinking: shiiiiit.

EZ took out his snuff, pinched some between his thumb and forefinger, and sniffed it. He offered Ed the tin. Ed took it and imitated EZ, but his attempt wasn’t nearly as graceful as EZ’s sniff. His eyes watered, he didn’t know whether to sneeze, cough, bellow, bark, cry or yell, and his face contorted into an absurd, abstracted look of a man who has just sniffed a vile dog fart.

EZ doubled over in laughter.

THEY WALKED back to the fence, hopped over and mounted their bikes. When they got back to the chairlift, EZ walked around the base of it, examining every detail. Then he pointed to the top.

“There it is. The receiver dish.”

Sure enough, there it was, perched atop the chairlift terminal. So EZ was right: the chairlift itself acted as a signal-relay for some reason or another. And he had never been clued in to it, even though he was supposedly the head engineer of the entire place. How had he missed that?

They hooked their bikes onto the chairlift for the ride up.

“Miss your lady, eh?” EZ asked.

“Yeah. Well, I suppose she’s my lady. Or at least she’s a good actress playing my lady. I don’t know. But I think I like having her around. Maybe she’ll inspire me,” Eddie said, jotting down his plan.

The chair whirred up the mountain.

“Maybe I’ll bring her by one of these days. We can double date,” Eddie said as he finished writing. He handed the notebook for EZ to examine.

EZ read and nodded his head. “You talkin’ about me and….”

“You and that Lisa librarian girl. Come on, I sensed a vibe there.”

“You’re too much.” He finished reading and handed the book back to Eddie.

“Ask her for coffee. See what she says.”

“Finish this book of yours.”

“I will.” Eddie said, then erased everything he had just written. “Maybe when I get off of this mountain and back home to L.A.”

“All right then, I will ask her out.”

That is how that conversation ended. They took the rest of the ride up the lift in silence. Upon returning their bikes, EZ asked Lisa out for lunch and she accepted. Then Eddie and EZ each caught an alpine-slide back down to the village.

THE NEXT morning, Fillono, EZ and Ed were seated at the Shelley Cafe, a small literature and horror movie-themed cafe at the base of the mountain in the main village.

“Well, Fred. It certainly has been an eye-opening experience. Thanks a lot for your hospitality.”

Fillono sipped from his little espresso cup, Ed followed suit and so did EZ. The scene was rather cozy and charming. EZ wore a large cowboy hat and aviator shades and was examining all the technology around in a different light. There were hundreds of those tiny satellite dishes scattered about everywhere, and what looked like tiny transmission towers, but in the guise of bric-a-brac artwork, fence-posts, sculptures, and just plain antennae.

Neither Eddie nor EZ mentioned this observation to Fillono. They knew that he knew and they knew that he had prodded them to sniff out in that direction without giving away that he was covertly directing them. A good director knows how to get his actors to do the right thing, seamlessly.

“Eddie. You know you are-a-welcome here any time. And when you finish your book, you come and be a guest lecturer, no?” Fillono smiled, sipping his espresso.

Ed nodded. “You bet.”

“Scoot safely,” EZ said.

They finished their coffees, shook hands, hugged, and Ed grabbed his backpack and made way toward the parking garage to his truck.

The truck started and sounded good; EZ had asked one of the mechanics at the resort to fix it up. He drove out of the parking garage and down the road. This time, he noticed all the cameras and tiny satellite dishes everywhere.

On the way out, a billboard sign flashed: Leaving Whynot. Thank You. Have a Swell Day. He opted for the main highway rather than the mountain pass “shortcut” he had taken on the way in. Out of habit, he went to put a tape into the deck before remembering he had, on the way there, gutted the thing when it had eaten its final tape. He dialed into the radio and found a static-ridden frequency for the local classical music station. Wagner’s Das Rheingold cracked out of the speakers into the cab.

The first leg of the drive was uneventful and scenic. Eddie was jazzed-up on the espresso and sweating more than normal, but was generally enjoying himself, taking care to watch his speed. He hit the Utah state line mid-afternoon and made certain to really watch his speed. He passed a sign reading “Zion” and had flashes of his adventures there. He wondered what the young couple, Eliza and JD, was doing, and he pondered if they, in fact, existed.

As the lines in the road cruised by, his mind raced and reeled and he claims to have experienced a spiritual kinship with Jack Kerouac as words and ideas and rhythms poured forth from his mind into the ether. Too bad he was driving, because he knew that these words would be lost forever. But, accompanied by the static (no radio signals existed out here), the din of the cab and the drone of the engine, he mused a jazzy poem to nobody but the passing desert, the sky, the air, the highway and any invisible beings he didn’t know about who happened to be eavesdropping upon him, in that moment, and, like jazz, a one-off piece that existed only in that moment in time.

When he stopped to take a leak and gas up, he put forth the attempt to catch that proverbial “lightning in a bottle” by jotting it down in the notebook, but the energy and freshness of it was lost. It was indeed relegated to the ether for time immemorial.

The following is that proverbial “lightning in a bottle” poem titled “if I were you”:

if I were you:

I would: get with it….

make certain there is an escape route….

take her by the hand and let her know….

wonder what it would be like to be me….

get the fuck back to Dodge and fight like a man….

get the fuck out of Dodge and flee like a wise man….

investigate the way….

wiretap the truth….

eyeball the life….

and run down the dirty bastard who sold you that second hand dream.

Ed had no idea where that poem would fit into the story, so he put it here.

The sun was setting and he was about halfway through Utah. The full moon was out and becoming brighter as the sky grew darker. He tried the radio and miraculously got another classical station. His hairs stood up when Carl Orf’s O Fortuna tumbled out of the speakers.

He pulled into a rest area and finished listening to the song. He clicked off the radio and turned off the truck. He crashed out there in the cab of his pickup.

THE EARLY sun crept over Ed and he woke up from a sound sleep. Aside from waking up a few times during the night because of the seatbelt jabbing into his side, or the thunderous engine of a big-rig truck that had entered the rest area, the night had been uneventful.

It seemed like his life was finally on track. No more pesky disturbances from doctors, strange military brass, or upside-down inter-dimensional men suspended in mid-air. He possibly had a girlfriend awaiting him, or an imposter posing as one. Either way, Eddie felt fine with that—if she was the real deal, he would be happy. If she was not, he would be fine, for he would be able to utilize her character for his own creative designs. That’s the way he made himself feel better with that option. But in all actuality, he hoped that she was an imposter that had actually fallen in love with him.

Yes, he knew how campy that sounded. But that is really how he felt about the whole thing.

He ate a protein bar and drank some water before hitting the restroom. En route, a peculiar gentleman approached him; his eyes locked onto Eddie’s for his entire approach. The guy looked to be in his thirties and seemingly very out of place out there in the middle of the Utah desert: for he was clad in a black, three-piece business suit, polished shoes and perfect hair. As they walked by one another he continued his unblinking stare, boring into Eddie.

Hot damn—the guy on the Greyhound who was bird-dogging me back in St. George…. Eddie thought.

“Howdy,” Eddie said as they passed, letting him know he wasn’t to be easily intimidated.

The man said nothing. He just stared. Once they passed, Ed imagined the guy was still staring at him from behind.

Screw that guy, Ed thought and went into the restroom, took a leak, washed his hands, brushed his teeth with his finger and splashed cold water on his face and hair.

He went back outside and the guy was gone.

Bring it on, Eddie thought.

He hit Vegas at around two in the afternoon and wondered if he should pay a visit to the good Colonel or his lackey psychiatrist. He opted against it. Better to pass right on by than get sucked into that vortex. Stick to the plan. Roughly five more hours until he’d be safely back inside the dirty belly of good ol’ Los Angeles.

HE CLIMBED up the stairs and unlocked the door to his apartment. A flash of déjà vu hit him as he entered, as though he had been through this exact scenario before. The place was clean, relatively cool, and smelled nice.

“Hi!” Mona, who had died her hair black, arose from behind a painting she was working on and came and gave him a big hug. “You look good. And tired. But good tired.”

Eddie smiled. She was still there. It was nice to hug her and it was nice to be back in his place. “I feel recharged and ready to get busy finishing this novel, start a new one, maybe crank out some short stories and screenplays. Hell, maybe I even have a stage play or two in me. Time to get out of the bush leagues and become a pro’s pro. I’ve got a new lease on life.”

Mona whistled. “Wow.”

“It was a helluva trip.” He set his backpack down on the couch and went to the fridge. “We got anything to drink that won’t mess me up?”

Ed could tell she was relieved at his question, and he opened the fridge to reveal some apple juice, milk and cola. He opted for a glass of milk and asked her if she wanted anything.

“No thanks,” she said.

He walked over to the couch and sat down. She sat in the recliner across from him. He finished his milk and set it on the coffee table, then unzipped his backpack, taking out some of his notebooks and the dusty old book he had found in the desert.

Mona straightened up into an attentive posture when she saw him brandish the book. “What is that old thing? It looks like it’s been buried in the desert for who knows how long.”

“That’s because it has.” He took great care in opening the cover to the first page.

She leaned closer. “What is it?”

“Listen closely, because this is going to sound completely crazy. But I’m trusting you with this information, so I hope you give me the benefit of the doubt.”

Her eyes widened. She nodded and gestured with her hands for Ed to continue.

He took in a deep breath and pondered where to begin. “This is the key in bringing down the New (and Improved) Interstellar Syndicate. I know they are monitoring this right now, but I don’t care, because I have this.” He held up the book. “And, I have you. They can take neither from me, because I love this book and I love you.”

Her face registered slight confusion, shock, empathy and her cheeks blushed a bit.

He took a sip of milk and continued, “This is, quite literally, My Book of Life, given to me by the Author of All That Is, Atoz Al Ways. He has imbued upon me Reality Authorship, whereupon I am co-author of the universe, so long as I don’t sell or give the rights to my material away to those who wish to seize control of it. So, in a nutshell, I’m crazy and solipsistic and control the entire universe.”

She smiled. “Um, you have a little milk on your lip.”

Great. So Eddie had a milk mustache during his speech. Classic.

She got up and sat next to him, putting her hand on his knee. “Eddie, in a weird way, you’re totally correct. You are in control of an entire universe.”

Where was she going with this? A knot tightened in his throat.

“…and you’re right. If you do not let go of these realities you have manufactured, or authored, you will not be able to get out of them. You will inhabit them for the rest of your life. As far as what I mean to you….”

He wasn’t sure he liked where this was headed. He sensed danger. He took another sip of milk and set the glass down on the table.

She wiped the new milk mustache away from his lips. “Eddie, do you recall how and when we met?”

He thought about it hard. “The first instance is the bar, that night, where your boyfriend smashed a beer mug over my head….”

She grabbed one of his notebooks he had taken out from his backpack and the tiny stub of a pencil and began to doodle on one of the pages. “Do you remember a place called ‘A to Z Research and Clinical Trials’? It’s where you and I met. You went in there because you read an ad in the paper and needed money. I was an aspiring actress with a minor in nursing so I was able to work there part-time. It was a good job that helped pay off student loans and allowed me time off when I needed to go audition. You were there, a nice guy and funny but a little shy and a little self-doubtful, but that’s beside the point. They were having you take some highly powerful drug that acted beyond what hallucinogens do. Once they realized that you could actually read people’s minds while on the drug, and began meticulously writing about how this entire organization was a CIA Manchurian Candidate Lab, they quickly ushered everyone working close to you to a secret facility by the base in Las Vegas. I didn’t even know the place I had been working was a front, I just thought it was a normal pharmaceuticaltesting facility.”

Ed leaned back and absorbed what she was saying.

She continued: “Eddie, they gave us a choice: sign on with the ‘Project’ and we would be rewarded handsomely, such as an acting career for me, or else be silenced, for good. Obviously, I chose the career path that involved speaking.”

“And Moroni….”

“Yes. He was one of the partners in the project. He took off with a bunch of samples. Nobody told me why, but I think he went rogue to do his own version of the experiment outside the lab, in society.”

Or that’s their “cover story,” thought Eddie.

Mona continued, “They upped the experiment with you though, and programmed your brain to inhabit a bunch of realities and bombarded you with different signals, so you wouldn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. That way, you would never be able to ‘expose’ them, because you would just seem like a lunatic. They made me sign ultra top-secret non-disclosure contracts and hired me on as your ‘handler,’ so that way they could roll you back out into the streets and watch to see if you ever made contact with Moroni, the only other guy that could bring them down. Eddie, before this, I never thought in a million years that anything like this was real. I just wanted to be an actress and help people. Honest.”

Ed began to speak, but nothing came out because a bunch of phlegm clogged his throat. He cleared it and said, “So, we’re not an actual couple?”

Ed noticed she had to hold back a sincere tear, or was a very good actress making him think she was holding back a tear.

She set the pencil down and squeezed his thigh. “Oh, Eddie. I do really care about you. And I think I have developed a fondness for you. But you would never be able to fully trust me. Our entire relationship is founded upon fraud and pretense. Most of it in fact is fraudulent. Even from your side, because of your condition.”

Wow. Reality shattered, yet again. How many more of these episodes could he endure? He had one final gasp. “Wait a second, you took all this from Chapter 80 of Planet Fever. I wrote that, and you are now just messing with me.”

“Eddie, you wrote that chapter many times, in different incarnations and revisions as your mind tried to make sense of the programming. I’m willing to bet it tried to make Colonel West a not-so-bad guy at times, because that’s what they were trying to program into you, even though you intuited otherwise. Am I right?”

Alarm bells went off. Aha, so she did know West. That wasn’t something they had programmed in as a false memory. His mind was beginning to get that ol’ messed-up feeling again.

“Another thing, Eddie.”

“Yeah?”

“They know about the plan.”

“What?”

Eddie heard the toilet flush. Out of the bathroom emerged the same guy Eddie had ditched from the bus, and had more recently passed at the rest stop in Utah, the guy in the three-piece. Ed then stood up way too fast and fell backward onto the couch. He felt dizzy. His mind was spinning. He reached into his pocket and found a loose pill, which he promptly swallowed. He closed his eyes.

“So, we’re not an actual couple?” he asked again, smiling. Then he wondered if his entire plan to save the universe was shot.

“NO, MR. Bikaver. We are not a couple in the fashion you are inquiring about,” the Interrogator says. “And your plan is shot. Nice try, thinking you could hand yourself in and then your pal, Ezekiel Buckminster, would come dashing in for a rescue. Fits your hackneyed style. You’ve been feeding us the entire narrative this whole time. That is the purpose of this interrogation. Even though you wrote down the plan with EZ in pencil and erased it, you narrated the fact that you were making a plan with him to me. We just deduced what the plan was based on that. He wouldn’t be able to make it here anyway, even if he were able to locate this place.”

Well, here I am again. In the first person. In the present.

“So, are you ready?” the voice asks.

“For what?”

“The part of your plan that we will follow. To hand over the rights to this ‘Book of Life’ of yours, given to you by Atoz Al Ways. You can yield it and inhabit a comfortable life in a scripted resort of your choosing. We will even write a decent role for you such as president or head of a bank or something. Perhaps mysterious yet popular reclusive author? Or you can remain in that chair, looping through various incarnations of your pathetic life over and over and over in what essentially amounts to endless psychological torture. The recurring cycle of being, each time being aware you’ve been through this before, but cannot do it differently: trapped in a circuit of routine like a series of déjà vu within déjà vu. What do you say, Edward Bikaver?”

I’m exhausted. I’m beat. I’m completely powerless to stave off this insanity. But I want to know something. Two things, in fact.

“I want a couple things first. One: since you’re going to erase my mind anyway, what is this special place?”

The Interrogator takes his time with this one. Then he answers, “Very well, Mr. Bikaver. You are on the dark side of the moon. Contrary to popular opinion, this moon is in fact an orbital satellite space station which projects synthetic simulations of realities upon the populace of your planet, to keep you pretty much hypnotized while we utilize your planet’s vast wealth of resources. We have been doing this for millennia. Next.”

“Okay. Do you know what happened to Froward Moroni?”

Dead silence. I hear a sliding door open and footsteps approach. From the darkness appears the figure of none other than Froward Moroni.

Moroni bows. “Hello, Mr. Bikaver. I trust you’ve enjoyed your stay, in this, my fair recliner today?”

What the hell is going on here?

A third eye manifests atop Moroni’s forehead and he takes a more serious posture. “That is a third question, but I will grant you the answer. I am Tritosofthalmian, and an RA hunter in the employ of Phos Atomos Paradosi. I have been monitoring this planet for some time, and took note of large amounts of creative activity from you and the others—a group of Reality Authors for Atoz Al Ways. I finagled the rest of them out, but you were the last holdout, Mr. Bikaver, and Atoz put a lot of stock in you. The fool. When we learned he gave you your Book of Life I nearly went to the ceiling of reality with delight. If I could get you to give up the rights to your entire existence, past, present and future, gaining all the rights to all your other works would be moot. We would have it, de facto. Because we would have you.” Moroni snapped his fingers.

A new set of footsteps enter. That same guy in the three-piece suit strolls in, carrying my backpack. He hands it to Moroni and strolls out.

Moroni unzips the backpack and reaches in. He picks up the tiny pencil and examines it. “As a souvenir.” He hands me the pencil, then reaches back into the bag. “Now for the moment to end all strife, behold, Edward Bikaver’s Book of Life!” He brandishes it and holds it high up in the air. After a moment of exaggerated flourish, he lowers the book and examines it. “Quite dusty. Anyway, you must state that you, Edward Bikaver, give me, Froward Moroni, representing the New (and Improved) Interstellar Syndicate, all rights to this book unconditionally.”

He leans in and his third eye leers at me, awaiting me to make my statement. A bead of sweat drips down the side of his forehead.

So this is it.

“I, Edward Bikaver, give you, Froward Moroni all the rights to that book in your hand unconditionally.”

He smiles wide. “Wise move.”

He begins to wipe the dust off the cover, relishing every moment. “We shall begin implementing your new virtual existence shortly, as soon as you fill out more….” He scrutinizes the book cover he has just wiped all the dust and dirt off of. “What is this?!”

The cover of the book says “My Little Book of Life Cycles1.”

It’s a reference book for pre-school children that follows life cycles, stages of frogs, butterflies, sunflowers, sharks, chickens, and bees through photos and simple explanations:

How do sunflowers begin?

When do tadpoles become frogs?

It has nothing to do specifically with my own existence.

I do not, nor have ever had any publishing rights to that book. I just found this copy in the desert and gave it to Moroni. I never stated which book it was.

“I am inside the moon. I am inside the moon. I am inside the moon,” I say into the watch strapped around my wrist.

Moroni is quite perturbed. “I know you are. I brought you here.” He attempts to collect himself by fixing his bow tie. “Where is your ‘Book of Life’?”

At this point, I begin to finish the book, Planet Fever, aloud, and jot it down with the pencil:

“I’m now tri-located. I’m in the moon, at the space where the Interrogator is Moroni. He’s asking for the book, believing that will wrap up ownership of my life, as well as ownership of the past, present and future of the Universe. He doesn’t know that I have taken a timed-released time capsule and that I’m experiencing this in present tense even though it will have been past tense by the time all is said and done.” I turn to Moroni. “Hah, I gave you a partially false narrative. You want to know why this pencil is worn down? Because Mona and I have been planning this all along, with EZ joining in. I just never included that part about Mona in my story, except that she was ‘doodling’ in my notebook. And she played her role well.”

Moroni’s third eye blinks in confusion.

“For the record: I’m finishing the book, and have given all the rights to it—past, present and future to the original author—who goes by the names of Peter Stier, Jr. and Atoz Al Ways. Good luck finding him, because he exists outside our known space-time-word continuum. Within that book in your hand, as well as this watch, Mr. Moroni, is a high-powered tracking beacon notifying my friend EZ Buckminster the location of this operation base. He has jacked your uplink and is currently sending up EMP pulses he has been working on from the sub-station you had at Fillono’s utopia. This entire time I was being ’interrogated’ by you was just a ruse for time so Buck could do his work. The artificial reality projection and hypnotic control you’ve been casting from here onto the earth’s populace will momentarily be over. How does that float your boat?”

Moroni’s third eye twitches. He takes in a deep breath and attempts to smile. “You could rescue the entire human race from being obliterated by twenty-five asteroids smashing into the planet, and most of them will shush you because you are interrupting their TV show.”

“I’m not doing this for the accolades.”

“Bikaver, you are bluffing. If you comprehend this, then you understand that the EMP will crash the entire system. The de-cloaking will pull all holographic realities, as well as accompanying mind-control parameters, off-line. You will see six billion people go utterly crazy, not knowing what to do because their entire existence has been controlled from the beginning. Imagine six billion zoo animals being set free, or six billion people coming off of heroin, nicotine and booze simultaneously and seeing thousands of three-eyed beings walking around among them and seeing the moon as a strange spaceship looming above? You are going to witness bedlam on a spectacular scale. Or, they won’t do anything. They won’t care, because you humans never cared. Either way, you lose Bikaver. We control reality.”

“Nah, you just control illusions and pass them off as reality.”

Moroni is visibly sweating. “Mr. Bikaver—if this station is compromised, its habitat stabilization system will desist operations. We will be able to survive, but you—sans gravity, oxygen, and such—will cease to exist.”

“I had a nice run.” I close my eyes.

I hear Moroni mutter some cuss words and his footsteps exit.

With the final lead in the worn-down pencil, I write down the words Thanks for the memories.

That’s the way the story goes.

1 My Little Book of Life Cycles, Camilla de la Bedoyere (QED Publishing)

“HAPPINESS: OH, poor Eddie. How can he be happy when he’s given fake versions of what others think he should call ‘happy?’ He thinks he is happy, but he is wrong, because he is dead and enslaved. But will he ever be happy? Free? Alive? We’ll see, won’t we—and that shall be the story….”

-Froward Morfoni

I CLIMBED up the stairs and unlocked the door to my apartment. I walked in and set the groceries on the counter.

“Hi there,” Mona said, from behind her easel.

“I remember you!” I joked. I always said this to Mona when coming home.

“I remember you, too!” Mona winked.

“Damn, it’s hot!” I opened the fridge, grabbed a pitcher of lemonade, poured a glass and gulped it back.

Mona peered out from behind her painting and smiled. “That’s why I’m painting something cool.”

I walked over to Mona, massaged her shoulders and checked out her painting: a picture from the point of view of a female, her bare legs extending out onto a lounge chair. She is holding hands with a male in a lounge chair next to her, facing a swimming pool that is located on the surface of the moon. The sky is black and they are watching the marvelous earth in the background like an oceanic sunset.

I gave her a thumbs-up and kissed her on the head.

“Colonel West called,” she said.

“What the hell did that weirdo want?”

“He just said, ‘Tell Eddie Bikaver he is a hero.’”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. Then he hung up.”

I shrugged and briefly contemplated what kind of psychological operation that asshole was trying to pull on me.

“Oh, and some guy stopped by. He dropped off one of your notebooks. He said you left it in his ‘rig’.” She gestured over to the coffee table.

I looked and there was one of my red notebooks, with a sticky-note on the cover that read, “You’re welcome.”

“And EZ and Lisa called. Dinner and a movie?” Mona asked.

“Sure.” I opened the notebook and a torn-out page from a newspaper fell out. It was the movie section. On it was highlighted (in green) a movie; a classic: The Rescuers.

Thanks, Woods.

PETER STIER JR. is a mammal and glad the other mammals on the planet have not invented atomic weaponry—he thinks one species per planet might be enough. He is a video editor by trade and has learned to appreciate lifting heavy objects repetitively in the same building with other people doing the same, as well as riding bikes that go nowhere, running up fake stairs and exerting considerable effort on other such contraptions. He lives in Los Angeles and loves his wife and dog.

If you enjoyed Planet Fever, be sure to leave a review on Amazon. People like those. And I’ll be much obliged.

To receive updates on new releases, inane blog posts and random non sequiturs, follow Pete on Twitter @peterstierjr or mindwashfollies.blogspot.com/

MOM, DAD, Simone, Winnie, friends, family, and Joshua Messiah – not sure why you did what you did for us but I thank you for doing it.

Table of Contents

Planet Fever

A Telepathic Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

The Following is the rest of Planet Fever

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Chapter 91

Chapter 92

Chapter 93

Chapter 94

Chapter 95

Pre-Epilogue

Epilogue

About the Author

Acknowledgements

OJW Conversion -

Planet Fever

A Telepathic Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

The Following is the rest of Planet Fever

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Chapter 91

Chapter 92

Chapter 93

Chapter 94

Chapter 95

Pre-Epilogue

Epilogue

About the Author

Acknowledgements